As you see, Obama's myRA is simply this CATO Institute policy for ending Social Security and replacing it with Wall Street savings plans....... In Maryland, Heather Mizeur embraces this policy by extending it to state policy with low-wage workers deductions for savings-----again to Wall Street savings plans.

This is the structure for ending Social Security and republicans have tried for decades to do this but it is the neo-liberals pushing it through as hard as they can.  MEANWHILE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE MADE TO THINK THEY ARE FIGHTING TO SAVE SOCIAL SECURITY!  Do you hear any pols shouting this is a republican plan to end Social Security?

Obama is using Executive privilege to advance this issue so neo-liberals will not have to vote to end Social Security.  While his administration works to build this myRA structure-----the expectation is that another neo-liberal will be elected President in 2016-----or a republican who will then advance this privatized model.

STOP VOTING FOR NEO-LIBERALS PRIVATIZING ALL THAT IS PUBLIC------RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES IN ALL PRIMARIES!


Social Security Choice Paper No. 8 A Plan for Privatizing Social Security

By Peter J. Ferrara April 30, 1997 Executive Summary

As Social Security’s problems become more apparent, there is growing support for the concept of privatizing the retirement program. As the debate grows it becomes more important to move beyond generalizations and provide detailed proposals for how such privatization can be accomplished. Without endorsing any specific proposal, the Cato Project on Social Security Privatization will present a number of possible privatization scenarios.

In this study, Peter Ferrara offers a proposal based on the following key elements:

• Current workers could be free to choose either the private option or Social Security. For those who choose the private plan, workers and employers will each pay 5 percent of wages, instead of the current Social Security payroll tax of 6.2 percent for each, into private investment accounts, resulting in an eventual payroll tax cut of 20 percent. Besides supporting retirement benefits, the accounts would finance private life and disability insurance, thus replacing Social Security survivors and disability benefits.
• Workers who opt out of the current Social Security system would receive recognition bonds from the federal government that would pay them a proportion of future Social Security benefits equal to the proportion of lifetime taxes they had already paid.
• Benefits promised to current retirees would be paid in full, with no reduction of any kind.

The biggest objection to privatizing Social Security has been the transition to a privatized system. But the projections of the fiscal impact of the plan offered in this study show that the transition can be financed without new taxes and without cutting benefits for today’s recipients.

Indeed, the yearly transition deficit would be offset after about 14 years. After that, the privatization reform actually starts producing a surplus for the federal government. About 20 years after the reform is begun, that surplus would be large enough in 1996 dollars to eliminate completely a federal deficit as large as today’s.

These projections place the transition in a whole new perspective. They show that the transition is financially feasible and manageable, and that modest short-term sacrifices would lead to long-term surpluses that would ultimately reduce the federal budget deficit.

Read the Full Social Security Choice Paper

• .pdf (107.37 KB)

Peter Ferrara is general counsel and chief economist at Americans for Tax Reform and an associate scholar of the Cato Institute.
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YOU CAN TELL MY AGE WHEN I GIVE SOCIAL SECURITY ITS OWN SITE!  THIS IS A HEALTHY PROGRAM UNDER ATTACK------FIGHT BACK!

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Neo-liberals joined the neo-conservatives in the Reagan/Clinton era to dismantle all of the public structures created from the New Deal and War on Poverty as it planned to have global corporations take control of government. So, when Reagan tripled payroll taxes on the workers saying he was fully funding Medicare and Social Security for the baby boomers----and then sent all that money to the US Treasury and not the Trusts------where it was spent building the military complex and NSA----Reagan never intended for the American people to receive those tax benefits. Clinton came along and gave a one-two punch to Welfare stating that we needed a Welfare to work plan to curb long-term connections to Welfare------only he did it at the same time he passed NAFTA and broke Glass Steagall knowing that US corporations would head overseas and tens of millions of Americans would be left unemployed-----no jobs to go from Welfare to work. This created the massive urban devolution. Then Bush gave us Medicare Part D-----all that spending on PHARMA for seniors seemed so supportive but did you know that Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D is only an attempt to move all seniors off of the Federal program Medicare. As soon as they do-----Wall Street will end Medicare Part D.

This neo-liberal/neo-con tag team will not only dismantle all the gains from Roosevelt and Johnson---- they are actually writing the American people out of the US Constitution with Trans Pacific Trade Pact----TPP started by Bush and pushed by Obama. We the People as citizens who legislate------gone. Equal Protection and Rule of Law for all Americans------gone. A Bill of Rights -----gone.

The Tea Party is fighting neo-cons because they know global corporations are killing free trade and the US Constitution. It is time for labor and justice to step up and fight neo-liberals for dismantling our rights as citizens and our public wealth!




How Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan Pulled off the Greatest Fraud Ever Perpetrated against the American People

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/04/how-ronald-reagan-and-alan-greenspan-p/

by Allen W. Smith / April 14th, 2010

David Leonhardt’s article, “Yes, 47% of Households Owe No Taxes. Look Closer,” in Tuesday’s New York Times was excellent, but it just scratches the tip of the iceberg of how the rich have gained at the expense of the working class during the past three decades. When Ronald Reagan became President in 1981, he abandoned the traditional economic policies, under which the United States had operated for the previous 40 years, and launched the nation in a dangerous new direction. As Newsweek magazine put it in its March 2, 1981 issue, “Reagan thus gambled the future — his own, his party’s, and in some measure the nation’s—on a perilous and largely untested new course called supply-side economics.”

Essentially, Reagan switched the federal government from what he critically called, a “tax and spend” policy, to a “borrow and spend” policy, where the government continued its heavy spending, but used borrowed money instead of tax revenue to pay the bills. The results were catastrophic. Although it had taken the United States more than 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion of national debt, it took only five years under Reagan to add the second one trillion dollars to the debt. By the end of the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administrations, the national debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion!

Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan pulled off one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated against the American people in the history of this great nation, and the underlying scam is still alive and well, more than a quarter century later. It represents the very foundation upon which the economic malpractice that led the nation to the great economic collapse of 2008 was built. Ronald Reagan was a cunning politician, but he didn’t know much about economics. Alan Greenspan was an economist, who had no reluctance to work with a politician on a plan that would further the cause of the right-wing goals that both he and President Reagan shared.

Both Reagan and Greenspan saw big government as an evil, and they saw big business as a virtue. They both had despised the progressive policies of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson, and they wanted to turn back the pages of time. They came up with the perfect strategy for the redistribution of income and wealth from the working class to the rich. Since we don’t know the nature of the private conversations that took place between Reagan and Greenspan, as well as between their aides, we cannot be sure whether the events that would follow over the next three decades were specifically planned by Reagan and Greenspan, or whether they were just the natural result of the actions the two men played such a big role in. Either way, both Reagan and Greenspan are revered by most conservatives and hated by most liberals.

If Reagan had campaigned for the presidency by promising big tax cuts for the rich and pledging to make up for the lost revenue by imposing substantial tax increases on the working class, he would probably not have been elected. But that is exactly what Reagan did, with the help of Alan Greenspan. Consider the following sequence of events:

1) President Reagan appointed Greenspan as chairman of the 1982 National Commission on Social Security Reform (aka The Greenspan Commission)

2) The Greenspan Commission recommended a major payroll tax hike to generate Social Security surpluses for the next 30 years, in order to build up a large reserve in the trust fund that could be drawn down during the years after Social Security began running deficits.

3) The 1983 Social Security amendments enacted hefty increases in the payroll tax in order to generate large future surpluses.

4) As soon as the first surpluses began to role in, in 1985, the money was put into the general revenue fund and spent on other government programs. None of the surplus was saved or invested in anything. The surplus Social Security revenue, that was paid by working Americans, was used to replace the lost revenue from Reagan’s big income tax cuts that went primarily to the rich.

5) In 1987, President Reagan nominated Greenspan as the successor to Paul Volker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Greenspan continued as Fed Chairman until January 31, 2006. (One can only speculate on whether the coveted Fed Chairmanship represented, at least in part, a payback for Greenspan’s role in initiating the Social Security surplus revenue.)

6) In 1990, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, a member of the Greenspan Commission, and one of the strongest advocates the the 1983 legislation, became outraged when he learned that first Reagan, and then President George H.W. Bush used the surplus Social Security revenue to pay for other government programs instead of saving and investing it for the baby boomers. Moynihan locked horns with President Bush and proposed repealing the 1983 payroll tax hike. Moynihan’s view was that if the government could not keep its hands out of the Social Security cookie jar, the cookie jar should be emptied, so there would be no surplus Social Security revenue for the government to loot. President Bush would have no part of repealing the payroll tax hike. The “read-my-lips-no-new-taxes” president was not about to give up his huge slush fund.

The practice of using every dollar of the surplus Social Security revenue for general government spending continues to this day. The 1983 payroll tax hike has generated approximately $2.5 trillion in surplus Social Security revenue which is supposed to be in the trust fund for use in paying for the retirement benefits of the baby boomers. But the trust fund is empty! It contains no real assets. As a result, the government will soon be unable to pay full benefits without a tax increase. Money can be spent or it can be saved. But you can’t do both. Absolutely none of the $2.5 trillion was saved or invested in anything. I have been laboring for more than a decade to expose the great Social Security scam. For more information, please visit my website or contact me.


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This is the best representation.....it is widely written that Reagan tripled payroll taxes, sent them to the Treasury where they have been used to build our military/spy complex. Reagan used as the reason for the hike....the need to have enough funds in the Trust to cover baby boomers. Now, of course they are pretending there is a shortfall. Massive payroll tax fraud has gone rampant this past decade as well. Can you imagine if we collected all of the payroll tax contributions businesses who fraudulently list their employees as independent contractors or fleece immigrant labor...

DO YOU THINK CLINTON COULD HAVE CHANGED THIS?  INDEED, BUT CLINTON DOUBLED-DOWN ON FLEECING LABOR AND JUSTICE AND CONTINUED ALAN GREENSPAN'S AYN RAND EMPIRE-BUILDING.


How Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan Pulled off the Greatest Fraud Ever Perpetrated against the American People

by Allen W. Smith / April 14th, 2010

David Leonhardt’s article,  “Yes, 47% of Households Owe No Taxes. Look Closer,” in Tuesday’s New York Times was excellent, but it just scratches the tip of the iceberg of how the rich have gained at the expense of the working class during the past three decades.  When Ronald Reagan became President in 1981, he abandoned the traditional economic policies, under which the United States had operated for the previous 40 years, and launched the nation in a dangerous new direction.  As Newsweek magazine put it in its March 2, 1981 issue, “Reagan thus gambled the future — his own, his party’s, and in some measure the nation’s—on a perilous and largely untested new course called supply-side economics.”

Essentially, Reagan switched the federal government from what he critically called, a “tax and spend” policy, to a “borrow and spend” policy, where the government continued its heavy spending, but used borrowed money instead of tax revenue to pay the bills.  The results were catastrophic.  Although it had taken the United States more than 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion of national debt, it took only five years under Reagan to add the second one trillion dollars to the debt.  By the end of the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administrations, the national debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion!

Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan pulled off one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated against the American people in the history of this great nation, and the underlying scam is still alive and well, more than a quarter century later.  It represents the very foundation upon which the economic malpractice that led the nation to the great economic collapse of 2008 was built.  Ronald Reagan was a cunning politician, but he didn’t know much about economics.  Alan Greenspan was an economist, who had no reluctance to work with a politician on a plan that would further the cause of the right-wing goals that both he and President Reagan shared. 

Both Reagan and Greenspan saw big government as an evil, and they saw big business as a virtue.  They both had despised the progressive policies of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson, and they wanted to turn back the pages of time. They came up with the perfect strategy for the redistribution of income and wealth from the working class to the rich. Since we don’t know the nature of the private conversations that took place between Reagan and Greenspan, as well as between their aides, we cannot be sure whether the events that would follow over the next three decades were specifically planned by Reagan and Greenspan, or whether they were just the natural result of the actions the two men played such a big role in.  Either way, both Reagan and Greenspan are revered by most conservatives and hated by most liberals.

If Reagan had campaigned for the presidency by promising big tax cuts for the rich and pledging to make up for the lost revenue by imposing substantial tax increases on the working class, he would probably not have been elected.  But that is exactly what Reagan did, with the help of Alan Greenspan.  Consider the following sequence of events:   

1) President Reagan appointed Greenspan as chairman of the 1982 National Commission on Social Security Reform (aka The Greenspan Commission)

2) The Greenspan Commission recommended a major payroll tax hike to generate Social Security surpluses for the next 30 years, in order to build up a large reserve in the trust fund that could be drawn down during the years after Social Security began running deficits.

3) The 1983 Social Security amendments enacted hefty increases in the payroll tax in order to generate large future surpluses. 

4) As soon as the first surpluses began to role in, in 1985, the money was put into the general revenue fund and spent on other government programs. None of the surplus was saved or invested in anything.  The surplus Social Security revenue, that was paid by working Americans, was used to replace the lost revenue from Reagan’s big income tax cuts that went primarily to the rich.  

5) In 1987, President Reagan nominated Greenspan as the successor to Paul Volker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.  Greenspan continued as Fed Chairman until January 31, 2006.  (One can only speculate on whether the coveted Fed Chairmanship represented, at least in part, a payback for Greenspan’s role in initiating the Social Security surplus  revenue.)

6) In 1990, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York,  a member of the Greenspan Commission, and one of the strongest advocates the the 1983 legislation, became outraged when he learned that first Reagan, and then President George H.W. Bush used the surplus Social Security revenue to pay for other government programs instead of saving and investing it for the baby boomers.  Moynihan locked horns with President Bush and proposed repealing the 1983 payroll tax hike.  Moynihan’s view was that if the government could not keep its hands out of the Social Security cookie jar, the cookie jar should be emptied, so there would be no surplus Social Security revenue for the government to loot. President Bush would have no part of repealing the payroll tax hike.  The “read-my-lips-no-new-taxes” president was not about to give up his huge slush fund.

The practice of using every dollar of the surplus Social Security revenue for general government spending continues to this day.  The 1983 payroll tax hike has generated approximately $2.5 trillion in surplus Social Security revenue which is supposed to be in the trust fund for use in paying for the retirement benefits of the baby boomers.  But the trust fund is empty!  It contains no real assets.  As a result, the government will soon be unable to pay full benefits without a tax increase.  Money can be spent or it can be saved.  But you can’t do both. Absolutely none of the $2.5 trillion was saved or invested in anything.  I have been laboring for more than a decade to expose the great Social Security scam.  For more information, please visit my website or contact me.

Dr. Allen W. Smith is a Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at Eastern Illinois University. He is the author of seven books and has been researching and writing about Social Security financing for the past ten years. His latest book is The Impending Social Security Crisis: The Government’s Big Dirty Secret. Read other articles by Allen, or visit Allen's website.


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THIS IS A BLOG

Regarding FED Chair Yellen's first policy statement:

This is my interpretation with paraphrase:

'I AM THROUGH PRETENDING THIS FED POLICY IS ABOUT ADDRESSING HIGH UNEMPLOYMENT AND MARKET STABILITY-----WE ARE PROUD TO BE A CRONY AND CORRUPT BRANCH OF WALL STREET WORKING ONLY TO ENRICH THE RICHEST'! 

This was Yellen's announcement and it even made the most corporate of mainstream anchors----Scott Pelley of CBS hang his head in shame.

We all have known the FED's policies had nothing to do with its stated mission of controlling unemployment and stabilizing the US economy, but after several years of the Obama's term and policy that created economic stagnation and an unemployment rate of 35-45% across the country with an economy ready to implode from a bond market bubble-----Yellen said, heck, we can no longer hide it.

 IT IS IMPORTANT TO SHOUT AND DOCUMENT THAT IT IS ILLEGAL FOR THE FED TO MOVE AWAY FROM ITS STATED MISSION.  IT CANNOT JUST ARBITRARILY CHOOSE TO EMBRACE POLICY THAT HARMS THE PEOPLE IT IS SUPPOSED TO PROTECT.

So, where Greenspan shouted 'LET THE MASSIVE SUBPRIME MORTGAGE FRAUD CONTINUE AT RECORD SPEED', Bernanke served saying THE CRONY WALL STREET MARKET SERVES TO MAKE A FEW THE RICHEST IN WORLD HISTORY AND THAT IS WHAT THE FED IS ALL ABOUT UNDER ME!  Yellen is posturing that she will super-size wealth inequity by using the FED in crony finance just as Bernanke did.  What the heck, US has no public justice system right now they say!  You know, Trans Pacific Trade Pact makes US law enforcement against corporations NULL and VOID and Wall Street considers TPP already in place!

Let's take a look at what Yellen is telling you and I.  After all we are peasants waiting to have law and policy pushed upon us and not citizens who write law the works in the public interest.

Manipulating inflation rates and interest rates to zero are near zero works to give corporations free money while keeping the public impoverished.  So, zero interest rates make it impossible for people to place their money in a savings account -----the goal is to force everyone back into a stock market we all know is criminal and corrupt.  If you lose money to inflation unless you place it in the stock market-----you are being fleeced.  So, for several years now the American people have lost millions of dollars to manipulated interest rates of zero.  Meanwhile, corporations are being paid by the FED not to work.....hire.....by giving them free money to invest in the stock market and expand overseas instead of growing the domestic economy.  WAIT UNTIL THESE CORPORATIONS GET RICH ENOUGH AND THEY WILL ALLOW IT TO TRICKLE DOWN WALL STREET SAYS.  Remember when Obama ran in 2007 saying he did not believe in trickle-down and yet-----that is the entire enchilada of his administration.

ZERO PERCENT INTEREST MAKES FOR PUBLIC LOSS OF MONEY IF TRYING TO SAVE IN A SAVINGS ACCOUNT.  IT IS MEANT TO FORCE YOU BACK INTO THE STOCK MARKET AND REMEMBER.....IT IS READY TO IMPLODE!



Is the Fed Waging War on Bank Savers?

By: Brian O'Connell

NEW YORK (BankingMyWay) — A new white paper on Federal Reserve economic policy draws the sharp conclusion that the Fed is waging a three-pronged war on bank savers.

Obviously, the Fed, led by chairman Ben Bernanke, has held fast to its low interest rate policy since the Great Recession began in 2008, and hasn’t let up since. According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the national average savings account rate is in the basement, at 0.14% , and the BankingMyWay Weekly Savings Rate tracker mirrors that number closely, at 0.15%.

If there’s any upside to the story, it’s that the Fed has decided to end the latest round of its monetary easing program and will likely no longer use artificial means to tamp down U.S. interest rates. But for bank savers, the damage is already done, and it’s not all just about interest rates.

Here’s a look at what one research outfit is calling Ben Bernanke’s “war on bank deposit savers” and the three ways it’s already under way:

Paltry savings rates at big banks. Big banks like Bank of America (Stock Quote: BAC) and JP Morgan Chase (Stock Quote: JPM) are offering savings rates at below 0.05%, points out FedUpUSA.org, a consumer financial advocacy organization. Since the 1960s the Fed has gone out of its way to give Americans a viable investment and savings alternative to the stock market, often keeping the key Fed Funds rate above 5%. But those days are long gone and bank deposit investors are paying the price.

Inflation is crushing bank deposit yields. In its April 2011 white paper, “Federal Reserve Punishes Savers By Subsidizing Big Banking Bailouts,” FedUSA.org argues that the Fed is trying to steer U.S. investors into the stock market, in large part by keeping interest rates so low that it isn’t worth it for investors to place their money in bank savings vehicles like certificates of deposits and money market accounts.

"The Federal Reserve is doing everything within its power to get people to spend or speculate in the stock market and hopefully over time create enough inflation to devalue our current debts," the FedUSA paper says. "This is why mortgage lending has gotten tougher (aside from government backed loans), getting a credit card is now for credit worthy customers and getting a small business loan is much more stringent. The purpose is to work through the current banking led fiasco by pushing on the debt to working and middle class Americans through lower savings rates and a push for higher inflation."

When inflation rises, as it has so far this year, bank CDs and money market accounts can’t keep up and thus are significantly reduced in value.

A smaller choice of consumer banking programs. Big banks and the Fed are currently entangled in a vicious wrestling match over bank fees. Front and center in that war are swipe fees that banks charge merchants who accept debit cards. The Federal Reserve is dropping those fees, from 44 cents per transaction to 12 cents per transaction, and in response, banks with $10 billion or more in assets are cutting bank credit card reward programs and are amping up bank deposit and ATM fees. The Fed just hasn’t learned a lesson that consumers already know too well – never get between a banker and his fee revenues.

Going forward, can consumers look forward to a break on the so-called ‘war on bank savers”? Probably. As rates rise, which they eventually will now that the Fed has taken its foot off the low-rate pedal, bank depositors will earn more on their savings and investments. But it won’t happen overnight. It’s going to take a while for things to wind down.

—For more ways to save, spend, invest and borrow, visit MainStreet.com.
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Whether you are a supporter of CPI-E which changes the way COLA are calculated to address the Cost of Living today or if you are someone who knows inflation today is far greater than even CPI-E would calculate, the point is that the manipulation of inflation and COLA has gotten too far out of hand.  As we watch cereal boxes shrink considerably while prices rise....when my cat litter jumps from $6 to $10....we have considerable inflation.  Health care costs are of course the biggest inflation cost for Americans and it is not even included in the current CPI.

AS WE REBUILD THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE WE NEED TO REMEMBER THESE LOSES TO SOCIAL PROGRAMS LIKE SOCIAL SECURITY AND VETERAN'S BENEFITS!

Do not think it is hyperbole when economists predict US inflation will soar when the FED is forced to change these manipulations.  Inflation may indeed hit 10-15% or higher.


 Manipulated inflation rates by government leading to lower COLA on Social Security for 2013


10:50 AM  John Williams, Shadowstats,

With the Federal Reserve and Federal government blatently manipulating the true rate of inflation in the economy, the results for 2013 are going to be a 1 or 2% COLA increase for Social Security recipients next year.



Charts courtesy of Shadowstats

Social Security recipients shouldn't expect a big increase in monthly benefits come January.

Preliminary figures show the annual benefit boost will be between 1 percent and 2 percent, which would be among the lowest since automatic adjustments were adopted in 1975. Monthly benefits for retired workers now average $1,237, meaning the typical retiree can expect a raise of between $12 and $24 a month.

The size of the increase will be made official Tuesday, when the government releases inflation figures for September. The announcement is unlikely to please a big block of voters _ 56 million people get benefits _ just three weeks before elections for president and Congress.

According to John Williams and Shadowstats, true inflation for 2012 is between 5 and 9%, dependent upon which model (1980 or 1990) one chooses to reference.  The government has manipulated real price inflation for more than two decades to ensure COLA increases are not in line with real inflation, to both save 10's of billion of dollars in benefit payouts, and to hide the fact that their deficit spending is causing massive inflation on essentials people need like food, energy, and rents.

Going into the 2012 election, the current administration doesn't want you to see the 30-80 rise in food prices over the past four years, and are making sure their media propagandists lie to you on what the real inflation rate is in the economy.

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Bernanke and neo-liberals in Congress along with Obama have tried to pretend inflation is at zero or close when everyone knew it wasn't.  Inflation has been at 3-5% just as always with the inflation rate ready to explode as soon as the FED ponzi scheme of QE has maximized the FED's debt ratio to its limit, which is coming now.  This is why Yellen is having to back out of QE----the FED is maxed with debt.  When Yellen does this the manipulation of inflation rate will end and they will not be able to hide the fact that inflation has been higher than stated and will grow to a very high rate when QE ends and interest rates rise to normal.

Remember, inflation was manipulated to zero to make it look as though the FED policy was not hurting the economy.  At the same time these manipulated inflation rates did a number on the public's wealth yet again!  THOSE NEO-LIBERALS TRYING TO SUCK ALL THE WEALTH THE PUBLIC CAN AMASS ANY WAY POSSIBLE.  That is what FED policy has been about since the 2008 crash.  So, the zero COLA for several years lowered senior's Social Security payments by on average a hundred dollars a month as did the Veteran's payments.  This is big money for a class already teetering below the poverty line.  It is why the national debt fell during Obama's term---a success to Wall Street.  National debt paid by falling social safety net cuts while Wall Street fraud stays with the looters.

ARTIFICIALLY MANIPULATED INFLATION RATES OF ZERO CREATED THE LARGEST CUTS TO SOCIAL SECURITY IN THE PROGRAM'S HISTORY COURTESY OF NEO-LIBERALS IN CONGRESS AND OBAMA.

This is no surprise.....Obama laid out these plans in 2009.....the question is why have no democrats shouted out against all of this.  If your incumbent has not sounded the alarm these few years....THEY ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND GET RID OF THEM.


Keep in mind these inflation rates of zero are fake.....all articles on the subject show everyone knows inflation was the normal 3-5% yet the FED listed it at zero and the Federal government under Obama allowed this fake inflation rate be used for SS and Vet COLAs. 

IT WAS DELIBERATE TO IMPOVERISH FURTHER PEOPLE RECEIVING MONEY FROM A PUBLIC TRUST.

So, we need labor and justice politicians to keep in mind seniors and Vets will need these several years of losses to monthly payments replaced with higher COLAs for several years.  We may need 7% COLAs for example over a decade to make up for losses these several years.  This actually fits with progressive policy that sees Social Security increases by larger amounts as we replace all the stolen pensions and retirements with Social Security.


Social Security COLA Doesn't Match Inflation
Retirees are falling further behind each year as medical costs rise by more than overall inflation.


By Philip Moeller Aug. 9, 2010 Leave a Comment SHARE

Last week's annual trustees' report on the financial health of Social Security showed the program did not suffer serious erosion during the past year. Current Social Security resources are sufficient to pay all benefits for the next 27 years. That's hardly the self-sustaining funding model that we'd like to see but it's good news nonetheless. However, it won't stop efforts to "fix" the program. And it won't halt the discussion over the adequacy of the annual cost of living adjustment (COLA) with which Social Security tries to keep retirees' benefits from being eroded by inflation.

Low rates of inflation in the year ended last fall caused the COLA to be zero for the first time in the 25-year history of these annual adjustments. Recipients received a one-time $250 payment, which helped compensate for that and was also pitched as an economic stimulus program.

Now, we're coming up on a second year with little if any inflation, as measured by a version of the Consumer Price Index used to determine the Social Security COLA. The index measures price changes for working people. Legislation has been introduced for another $250 payment, and AARP and other groups are lobbying for its approval.

However, the fiscal picture is much darker than it was even a year ago. And while Social Security's finances may have held up, the same is not true of the government's budget. We are awash in red ink with no end in sight to deficits. With mid-term elections this fall, just about everyone has found religion when it comes to government spending. So, the argument for another round of make-good Social Security payments is a tougher sell in 2010 than it was last year.

However, according to a recent academic study, the fairness of such a payment is beyond dispute. The study reviewed Social Security payments over many years, backed out spending on basic Medicare premiums (for part B physician and outpatient services) and other out-of-pocket medical spending, and then compared the remaining amounts with money that recipients paid for other goods. Researchers studied a group of older retirees who turned 65 in 1983 (the year the COLA began), and a second group of persons born in 1928. The authors -- Gopi Shan Goda and John B. Shoven at Stanford and Sita Nataraj Slavov at Occidental College -- found the value of recipients' benefits for non-healthcare spending had eroded by about 20 percent for men and nearly 27 percent for women. Those are big cuts: one out of every five dollars in benefits is effectively gone for men; one of every four dollars for women.

And their findings probably understate the actual ground lost, because the study did not include the cost of other health insurance premiums when considering out-of-pocket healthcare spending. Besides Part B premiums, other insurance includes Medicare Supplement, Medicare Advantage, Part D prescription drug coverage, and other private coverages. To the extent that the rise in premiums for such insurance has exceeded the overall rate of inflation, the study's findings would need to be adjusted to show further erosion in the effective non-medical buying power of Social Security benefits. And by all accounts, health insurance price inflation has far outpaced the rise in overall prices.


"Of course, these results assume no other income besides Social Security," the researchers say, "but a sizable fraction of the elderly depend on Social Security for the majority of their income: 64 percent of beneficiaries rely on Social Security for 50 percent or more of their income, and 35 percent of beneficiaries rely on Social Security for 90 percent or more of their income."

Even if funds were available, fixing this situation is no easy matter. This is because there are two root causes for how healthcare expenses erode the true value of Social Security benefits. The first is the rate of inflation for such expenses. The second is the fact that people simply use more healthcare as they age. "Even if medical costs did not rise faster than the prices of other goods," the study says, "as retirees aged, their medical spending would still tend to increase as a share of income."

There is an experimental government price index called CPI-E that is designed to measure the actual spending of retirees. It thus includes more weighting for medical costs. "The CPI-E has increased faster than the CPI-W over the past 20 years," the study says, "due primarily to the relative rise in health costs, and the fact that the elderly spend more on health care than the non-elderly, even after taking into account the availability of Medicare." Using the CPI-E to determine the annual COLAs for the study's subjects would have narrowed the gap, with men falling only 11 short of maintaining their effective buying power for non-medical items, and women falling 18 percent short.

But the financial consequences of even this seemingly simply shift are huge. Remember that 27-year estimate for Social Security sufficiency? According to one study, using the CPI-E to set annual COLAs would slice five years from that cushion all by itself. Further, like all measures of price change, the CPI-E does not even try to factor in changes in product quality. The $1,000 television set you buy today is vastly superior to the $1,000 set you could have bought 20 years ago. Such qualitative improvements have been enormous in healthcare.

With all the talk about changing Social Security, it would seem to make great common sense to take a careful look at the COLA mechanism. What good is it to put the program on a sound 75-year trajectory again if the interests of seniors aren't appropriately considered and protected in the process?

____________________________________________________________________

You will not hear corporate media explain to you that Obama's myRA is Social Security privatization -----a republican plan to end yet another public Trust only a politician running as a democrat is doing it.  You will hear corporate NPR advertise this policy as a good thing for the impoverished masses who just cannot seem to save money themselves.

THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL FOR YOU AND ALL MARYLAND POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS!

Wall Street wants all of the Social Security and Medicare Trusts back in the stock market where Wall Street can use the money to maximize profit with leveraging that always sends public money out to act as fodder in investments with huge losses over and over and over.  Who wouldn't want Social Security tosses into the stock market?  EVERYONE!!!!!


'The same plan may be in the works for Social Security. In his speech, the President announced a new retirement savings program, MyRA. Although the details of MyRa are not clear, it is based on creating individual retirement accounts (IRAs) for workers who don’t currently have them'.


Obama Lays Groundwork to Destroy another Social Insurance


by MFlowers   

By Margaret Flowers

Originally published in GreenShadowCabinet.us

President Obama’s comments about the health law in his State of the Union speech lacked substance and were primarily focused on selling his law, and more insurance, to the public. He avoided discussing the root causes of our ongoing healthcare crisis and set the ball in motion to destroy another pillar of our social infrastructure, Social Security.

The bottom line of President Obama’s comments on the health law was that more people have health insurance and insurance companies can’t deny people based on pre-existing conditions. He urged everyone to make their friends and family buy insurance.

What he didn’t say is that people with health insurance in the United States still can’t afford the care they need and face bankruptcy if they have a serious health problem. And although insurance companies cannot deny policies to people with pre-existing conditions, they have a number of ways to avoid paying for peoples care.

The health law perpetuates a health system that treats health care as a commodity so that people only receive the amount of health care they can afford rather than treating it as a public good, as does every other industrialized nation. This is the root cause of the health crisis in the US. Any system that leaves healthcare in the marketplace, because it is based on generating profits for investors, will result in inequalities of access to care and rising healthcare costs.

Using a market-based model for social insurances sets a dangerous precedent. Traditional social insurances are provided by the government and are paid for through taxes. They are designed to meet the needs of the public rather than to provide a profit and so they guarantee a universal set of benefits for everyone. Each pays in according to their means.

The health law is doing the opposite. It is driving our entire health system to one that is provided by private entities and is paid for by individuals. Each person gets the amount of coverage they can afford. Those who cannot afford what they need are left to suffer. Since the health law was signed, there has been greater privatization of Medicaid and Medicare and billions of taxpayer dollars have been used to sell and subsidize private insurance. If we continue on this path, down the road Medicaid and Medicare will be rolled into the health exchanges and only private insurance will be available.

The same plan may be in the works for Social Security. In his speech, the President announced a new retirement savings program, MyRA. Although the details of MyRa are not clear, it is based on creating individual retirement accounts (IRAs) for workers who don’t currently have them.

What we do know is that Social Security has been under attack throughout the President’s time in office. Rather than doing what is needed, raising the cap, or going beyond that and raising benefits, there have been attempts to cut benefits and raise the age of eligibility. The public is being told that Social Security is in a crisis but is not being told that this ‘crisis’ is intentional. Unlike Social Security, IRAs are managed by financial institutions that profit from them. MyRa is another gift to Wall Street by President Obama.

We are living in an era of big finance capitalism, a predatory capitalism, based on the neoliberal economic model. It is being applied to every aspect of our society through dismantling of our public programs and privatization of our resources and services. Under this system, the basic necessities of each person are not guaranteed. Instead, it is designed to funnel wealth to the top by making everything into a commodity, a profit center for investors.

This path will continue until we rise up to challenge it. We must understand what is happening and that the destruction of our public programs is intentional, but not inevitable. There are solutions to the crises we face. For example, a health care system based on a non-profit Medicare for all model and a retirement system based on a stronger Social Security. These are obvious solutions, supported by a majority of Americans and logistically easy to put in place – if the government actually represented the people.

The President closed his remarks on health care by saying, “So again, if you have specific plans to cut costs, cover more people, increase choice, tell America what you’d do differently.” The last time he said that in a State of the Union speech, I tried to respond and was arrested. This time we must respond together by working to build a mass social movement that has the power to make our demands a reality.

~ Margaret Flowers MD, Serves as Secretary of Health in the General Welfare Branch of the Green Shadow Cabinet.


______________________________________________________________________________

It has been a sad state of affairs to watch the neo-liberal media and economists send out all kinds of propaganda on Social Security and threats to its future.  Keep in mind, neo-liberals are committed to ending all War on Poverty and New Deal programs----that has to happen for Trans Pacific Trade Pact to become enacted.  So, neo-liberals are creating drama around Social Security to hide the ultimate goal----myRA.  As we are fighting Chain CPI and fake inflation rates and direct cuts to how much Social Security payments will be, the policy neo-liberals are pushing simply ends Social Security as a Federal program.  You do not hear one neo-liberal economist saying anything about how myRA will end Social Security-----they are saying we won the fight to protect Social Security from Chain CPI.  Chain CPI was not good but myRA ends SS for goodness sake!


IF YOUR PUNDIT OR POLITICIAN IS NOT SHOUTING THAT myRA FROM OBAMA IS ABOUT ENDING SOCIAL SECURITY-----THEY ARE NEO-LIBERALS!

Baker, Reich, Krugman are all neo-liberal economists feeling the American people's pain yet never quite able to shout that neo-liberalism is the killer.



Social Security COLA to increase by 1.5 Percent in 2014
   
Written by Dean Baker  
Wednesday, 30 October 2013 10:00


Changing the basis of the COLA to the chained CPI would cut an already modest cost-of-living-adjustment.

The Social Security Administration has announced the Social Security cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) will be 1.5 percent in 2014. Beneficiaries will begin seeing the increase in their checks in January.

It is worth noting that this COLA based on the consumer price index for wage and clerical workers (CPI-W) is likely to be lower than the rate of inflation shown by the BLS experimental elderly index (CPI-E), which is designed to reflect the purchasing patterns of the elderly. The biggest differences between the two indices are the weights assigned to health care and housing, with both components accounting for a much larger share of the CPI-E than the CPI-W.

The price of medical care services was up 3.1 percent in August from its year-ago level. The price of the CPI’s shelter component was up 2.4 percent from its year-ago level. As a result of the more rapid price increases in these components, the CPI-E would likely show a rate of inflation that 0.1-0.2 percentage points higher than the CPI-W. This would suggest that the rate of inflation seen by seniors is somewhat higher than the COLA they are now getting for Social Security.

However, this gap would increase if the COLA indexation switched to the chained CPI (CCPI-U). This index typically shows a rate of inflation that is 0.2-0.3 percentage points lower than the CPI-W. The reason for the difference is that CCPI-U incorporates the impact of substitution on consumption costs. If the price of apples rises less rapidly than the price of oranges, and people switch from consuming oranges to apples, then the CCPI would lower the weight it assigns to oranges and increases the weight it assigns to apples. This leads it to show a lower measured rate of inflation, which arguably reflects actual patterns in consumption.

While the CCPI-U may be picking up substitution patterns for the population as a whole, it is not clear that it accurately reflects substitution patterns among seniors. The goods disproportionately consumed by seniors, health care and housing, don’t lend themselves to easy substitution. Furthermore, it is not clear that seniors can substitute for other goods with the same ease as the rest of the population.

Unfortunately, neither BLS or the proponents of adopting the chained CPI for the COLA have done research on this topic.

In short, there is some reason to believe that the current COLA already does not adequately compensate seniors for the rate of inflation they experience. This problem would be worse if the basis for the COLA is changed to the chained CPI.


THIS ENDS A BLOG
________________________________________________________________
Baby Boomers know how to throw a revolution-----just do it!

As Living Standards Fall for Seniors, Some See Signs of ‘Silver Revolution’
By DAVID WALLISMARCH 14, 2014  New York Times

Photo Community activist Ann A. Stewart, seated, attends a Massachusetts Senior Action Council chapter meeting. Ms. Stewart, 89, was arrested in Boston for participating in a street protest over the doubling of fares for a local paratransit service. Credit Mylan Cannon/The New York Times

BEFORE Boston police detained Ann A. Stewart last August, she had a clean record. But she vows not to wait long, certainly not another 89 years, to become a repeat offender.

Ms. Stewart, 89, a retired hospital employee, was arrested while chanting slogans with a few co-conspirators from inside an imitation jail cell to protest the doubling of the local paratransit fare to $4. Protest organizers erected the fake prison in the middle of the city’s busy Stuart Street to symbolize the fare increase’s effect on disabled riders on fixed incomes, and to block traffic. Ms. Stewart’s arresting officer — “a very nice young man,” she recalled — did not place her in handcuffs and let her keep her cane.

Ms. Stewart, who does not use paratransit herself, treasures the memory of her approximately two hours in custody. “It means a lot to me,” she said. “I’m very strong in my belief about certain things a senior should be able to do.”

Not long after the August protest (which was part of a longer campaign), the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority rolled back the paratransit fare by one dollar — evidence, in Ms. Stewart’s opinion, that older adults must aggressively fight for their rights.

Photo Ann A. Stewart, 89: “I’m very strong in my belief about certain things a senior should be able to do.” Credit Mylan Cannon/The New York Times In Europe, older protesters often make noise. In 2012, throngs of Greek pensioners marched in Athens to oppose austerity measures. Last October, a raucous crowd estimated at 10,000 rallied in front of the Irish Parliament to denounce medical benefit cuts for people over 65.

For now, the senior rights movement in America remains relatively muted. Perhaps as Tom Hayden, the 1960s activist, suggested, the “price of some success is that the voluntary activist groups can feel less needed.” Could older Americans just be complacent? Maybe demonstrating in the streets is best left to the young? Or perhaps, as one experienced activist argued, unfavorable media coverage of events like Occupy Wall Street gives protesting a bad name.

Whatever the reasons, several social scientists say deteriorating conditions for retirees and older Americans in general — intensifying fear about retirement security, age discrimination, increasing poverty among the elderly and new threats to cut programs for seniors — could be the impetus for what some are calling a “silver revolution.”

“Now would be the time for senior rights movements to mobilize once again,” Andrea Louise Campbell, author of “How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Citizen Activism and the American Welfare State,” suggested in an email. Ms. Campbell pointed to recent proposals by politicians to trim Social Security benefits and convert Medicare into a voucher program as actions meriting a response.

“If there’s a direct threat to Social Security or Medicare, that’s when you do see people mobilizing,” said Jill B. Quadagno, a professor of sociology at Florida State University who studies social gerontology. Ms. Quadagno recounted that in 1964, roughly 14,000 protesters, predominantly retirees, marched outside the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J. The National Council of Senior Citizens, backed by the A.F.L.-C.I.O., staged the show of force to prod politicians to support President Lyndon B. Johnson’s proposal for Medicare, which was enacted the next year. Later that decade and in the 1970s, advocates for older adults battled to expand Social Security, winning, among other policy changes, automatic cost-of-living adjustments.

In 1970, Maggie Kuhn founded the Gray Panthers to combat age discrimination and establish an intergenerational coalition for social justice. Her longtime employer, the United Presbyterian Church, had forced Ms. Kuhn to retire at 65. In 1986, after sustained pressure from the Gray Panthers and other advocates, President Ronald W. Reagan, then 75, joined with the 73-year-old speaker of the House, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., to abolish the mandatory retirement age. Ms. Kuhn, who traded barbs with Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” became a pop culture figure; at the height of the Gray Panthers’ power in the early 1980s, the organization had roughly 60,000 financial contributors.

The Gray Panthers’ influence ebbed in the mid-1980s and eroded further after Ms. Kuhn’s death in 1995, which “drained the social movement of its energy,” Vincent Roscigno, a professor of sociology at Ohio State University, said in an email. Writing in Z Magazine, Eric Laursen analyzed the Gray Panthers as “victims of their own success,” in that they achieved many of their early initiatives.

The well-funded, 37-million-member American Association of Retired Persons (later renamed AARP), founded in 1958, also emerged as a front-line advocate for senior citizens, but the organization performs its advocacy work through more traditional lobbying efforts, not street protests. While the AARP pushes “important ideas that are important for older people,” said Eric R. Kingson, a professor of social work at Syracuse University who studies aging, “they’re not the Gray Panthers.”

The Gray Panthers organization now has roughly 15,000 members and a diminished public profile. Sally Brown, the group’s current executive director, blames the flagging troop strength on a general lack of activism in America and a “corporatized” media that “demonized” social movements like Occupy Wall Street. “The activism then just gets squelched and doesn’t lead to the change that people see, so that’s disempowering to people, and they disengage,” said Ms. Brown.

“I wish Maggie were here,” said Mr. Kingson. But even without a charismatic general, he predicted the senior rights movement would charge forward. “We’re not France. When they tried to raise the retirement age, people went to the barricades,” he said. “But if we are pushed far enough as a people, there will be a reaction. Many people are right on edge, maintaining their standard of living as retirees. I think they are scared.”

Data supports Mr. Kingson’s premise. The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College reported in 2013 that more than half of working-age households faced a deteriorating standard of living in retirement. A Pew Research Center survey published in 2012 found that the percentage of people ages 55 to 64 who doubt that they will have enough to live on during retirement rose to 39 percent in 2012 from 26 percent in 2009. And the number of seniors experiencing hunger rose 200 percent between 2001 and 2011, according to a report by the Meals on Wheels Research Foundation.

Pervasive biases against older employees should radicalize seniors across the political spectrum, said Mr. Roscigno, an expert on workplace discrimination. “We live in a society consumed and obsessed by freshness and youth,” said Mr. Roscigno. “This can and does culminate in discrimination in hiring, in firing and in general harassment.”

When aging workers lose their jobs, he noted, they find it far more difficult than younger colleagues to find re-employment. The number of age discrimination cases filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission increased by more than 50 percent from 1999 to 2013.

Images of aging picketers carrying canes and protest signs are potent weapons in the advocacy arsenal, said Mr. Hayden. “We live very much now in a protest era that concentrates on the visual entirely, so, yes, the elderly in the front ranks holding the right placards does make a difference to political consultants,” he said.

But getting arrested during a protest can take a toll on elderly activists. “It’s always uncomfortable when you have steel on your soft tissues,” said Alfred Klinger, an 87-year-old retired physician who was handcuffed during a protest in Chicago in 2011 over threatened cuts to social service programs.

Mr. Hayden, 74, who as one of the “Chicago Eight” was indicted on federal charges of incitement to riot after street protests at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, is admittedly skittish about attending demonstrations these days.

“The fact that I had heart surgery 12 years ago is a contributing factor,” he acknowledged. “I don’t really want to be pepper-sprayed if I can avoid it. It wouldn’t bother me if it was 1968.”

Manning the barricades, Mr. Hayden said, might be a younger person’s mission. But he added: “If you hear of any new movements for climate protection or women’s rights or anything else led by 80-year-olds, let me know. Sign me up.”


________________________________________________________________________________
This is a good look at the problems of CPI vs CPI-E.  Obama got rid of Chain CPI which was bad, but he has allowed for CPI and COLA to use a FED directed inflation number that no one believes reflect true inflation....it is manipulated so far down as to deny COLA increases costing seniors and vets hundreds of dollars a month in payments.  This is by design to lower the national debt by taking from the public.

What this article does not address that is worse.....the myRA goal of building the private structure to end Social Security altogether.

Obama's Budget Preserves COLA for Social Security: What it Really Means to Seniors
By James O'Brien  The Motley Fool


Despite a narrow brush with a new reduction to Social Security benefits, seniors will not see the proposed move to a more conservative cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, in 2014. President Barack Obama's announcement on Feb. 2 that he was scrapping the earlier proposal preserves the status quo for seniors -- for now. The grand budget compromise it was supposed to prompt did not materialize.

The back and forth on COLAs, however, is not resolved. It is deeply linked to larger issues of what we mean when we talk about inflation and expenses for the elderly. Let's look at the landscape, as it stands, and what hasn't yet been addressed when it comes to COLAs and seniors' costs.

COLA: What actually (almost) happened -- CPI-W versus chained CPI
Obama originally sought last year to link Social Security's COLAs to a more conservative measure of inflation. Currently, Social Security is pegged to a consumer price index known as the CPI-W. It's a broad measure of merchandise costs, and it's categorized by a demographic that includes urban wage-earners and clerical workers. It measures many goods, sold in many places, over time. The idea is that the COLA given under Social Security changes to keep pace with trends in the costs of these goods under this index.

There is, however, more than one consumer price index. And the president proposed a switch from CPI-W to the "chained" CPI. It's called "chained" because while it's linked to shifts in the prices of different kinds of goods, it often refocuses to lower-cost (and perhaps lower-quality) goods to account for the fact that consumers tend to buy cheaper goods in an inflationary environment. One upshot of this difference is that the chained CPI can suggest a lower rate of inflation than the CPI-W.

And that's no small change.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research put it this way: If we start measuring the growth of inflation by the smaller numbers of the chained CPI, the average worker retiring at age 65 would see a reduction in benefits of about $650 each year by age 75. The reduction grows to roughly $1,130 annually by the time you reach age 85.

What's at stake: Seniors and the cost of health care
For now, there will be no downward change in the COLA for Social Security. A deeper problem looms, however. Are we measuring how we allocate Social Security COLAs to seniors in a way that makes good sense, in light of the things they pay for the most?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the goods people over the age of 62 buy are different from what people in their 20s and 40s tend to purchase. Consider, for example, the weight of health care in the equation.

Rather than rank medical services' relative importance at about 6%, as the CPI-W does, CPI-E tells us that for seniors it should be considered nearly 15% of total expenditures.

Typical Social Security benefits of $1,269 per month don't take you very far in paying for doctors and hospitals. A lifetime of health care for an average recipient living to 95 can rise as high as $318,800.

And, generally speaking, that number represents what's paid after Medicare covers its part of the bill -- with seniors' private health insurance or other resources helping to cover the rest. And then there are the Part B and Part D premiums to consider.

Money for medical services clearly has to come from somewhere other than just Social Security -- the benefits of which account for at least 50% of annual income for two-thirds of seniors, and for 90% among one-third of them. So, private health insurance, savings, investments -- these are important factors as well. There might, however, be a better way to represent how COLAs augment those resources that seniors do have: the CPI-E.

Rather than peg COLAs to the cost of goods that people in their 20s and 40s buy, the still-experimental consumer price index for the elderly emphasizes the importance of the kind of goods and services that seniors use most. Like health care.

So why don't we use it?

One does find the CPI-E lurking, now and then, in proposed bills. A recent inclusion: Senator Mark Begich (D-Alaska) made CPI-E part of his Protecting and Preserving Social Security Act, in 2013. The legislation has been sitting in subcommittee since April 2013.

Some might tell you that fiscally conservative politicians are more interested in cutting benefits programs than expanding them. Others could point to the CPI-E's experimental status -- suggesting that until the Bureau of Labor Statistics receives the funding to fully build out the index, uncertainty about its effectiveness remains.Whatever the nature of the process, however, it doesn't alter what is at the core of the CPI-E option: More accurately measure the consumer behaviors of the demographic receiving benefits that are attached to inflation, and you'll allocate their COLAs with more accuracy as a result.

And that would remove some of the pressure from seniors when it comes to proposals such as Obama's recent plan, which would give them less to pay for the things they use the most, all because less significant purchases are still the standard by which their cost of living is measured.

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_________________________________________
This is no surprise.....Obama laid out these plans in 2009.....the question is why have no democrats shouted out against all of this.  If your incumbent has not sounded the alarm these few years....THEY ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND GET RID OF THEM.

Obama Lays Groundwork to Destroy another Social Insurance
by MFlowers

By Margaret Flowers

Originally published in GreenShadowCabinet.us

President Obama’s comments about the health law in his State of the Union speech lacked substance and were primarily focused on selling his law, and more insurance, to the public. He avoided discussing the root causes of our ongoing healthcare crisis and set the ball in motion to destroy another pillar of our social infrastructure, Social Security.

The bottom line of President Obama’s comments on the health law was that more people have health insurance and insurance companies can’t deny people based on pre-existing conditions. He urged everyone to make their friends and family buy insurance.

What he didn’t say is that people with health insurance in the United States still can’t afford the care they need and face bankruptcy if they have a serious health problem. And although insurance companies cannot deny policies to people with pre-existing conditions, they have a number of ways to avoid paying for peoples care.

The health law perpetuates a health system that treats health care as a commodity so that people only receive the amount of health care they can afford rather than treating it as a public good, as does every other industrialized nation. This is the root cause of the health crisis in the US. Any system that leaves healthcare in the marketplace, because it is based on generating profits for investors, will result in inequalities of access to care and rising healthcare costs.

Using a market-based model for social insurances sets a dangerous precedent. Traditional social insurances are provided by the government and are paid for through taxes. They are designed to meet the needs of the public rather than to provide a profit and so they guarantee a universal set of benefits for everyone. Each pays in according to their means.

The health law is doing the opposite. It is driving our entire health system to one that is provided by private entities and is paid for by individuals. Each person gets the amount of coverage they can afford. Those who cannot afford what they need are left to suffer. Since the health law was signed, there has been greater privatization of Medicaid and Medicare and billions of taxpayer dollars have been used to sell and subsidize private insurance. If we continue on this path, down the road Medicaid and Medicare will be rolled into the health exchanges and only private insurance will be available.

The same plan may be in the works for Social Security. In his speech, the President announced a new retirement savings program, MyRA. Although the details of MyRa are not clear, it is based on creating individual retirement accounts (IRAs) for workers who don’t currently have them.

What we do know is that Social Security has been under attack throughout the President’s time in office. Rather than doing what is needed, raising the cap, or going beyond that and raising benefits, there have been attempts to cut benefits and raise the age of eligibility. The public is being told that Social Security is in a crisis but is not being told that this ‘crisis’ is intentional. Unlike Social Security, IRAs are managed by financial institutions that profit from them. MyRa is another gift to Wall Street by President Obama.

We are living in an era of big finance capitalism, a predatory capitalism, based on the neoliberal economic model. It is being applied to every aspect of our society through dismantling of our public programs and privatization of our resources and services. Under this system, the basic necessities of each person are not guaranteed. Instead, it is designed to funnel wealth to the top by making everything into a commodity, a profit center for investors.

This path will continue until we rise up to challenge it. We must understand what is happening and that the destruction of our public programs is intentional, but not inevitable. There are solutions to the crises we face. For example, a health care system based on a non-profit Medicare for all model and a retirement system based on a stronger Social Security. These are obvious solutions, supported by a majority of Americans and logistically easy to put in place – if the government actually represented the people.

The President closed his remarks on health care by saying, “So again, if you have specific plans to cut costs, cover more people, increase choice, tell America what you’d do differently.” The last time he said that in a State of the Union speech, I tried to respond and was arrested. This time we must respond together by working to build a mass social movement that has the power to make our demands a reality.

~ Margaret Flowers MD, Serves as Secretary of Health in the General Welfare Branch of the Green Shadow Cabinet.




__________________________________________________________
Next on the agenda of neo-liberals in Congress and Obama is getting rid of Social Security.....now that the Affordable Care Act gets rid of Federal programs Medicare and Medicaid by building state health systems to which to throw these programs. This myRA is simply a payroll deduction that looks to augment SS but will replace this Federal program as people are made to make the switch not long from now. Obama knows Wall Street wants all public agencies competing for corporate profit out of the picture and privatizing Social Security hands trillions of dollars to the stock market. Again, this private plan was written by republican think tanks and Obama is pushing yet another republican plan.

JUST WHAT WE WANT.....MORE RETIREMENT MONEY IN THE HANDS OF WALL STREET!

Obama Offering Retirement-Savings Plan for Workers
By Mike Dorning and Margaret Collins
Bloomberg Financial
Jan 28, 2014 9:51 PM ET

President Barack Obama offered more Americans the chance to save for retirement through payroll deductions with a plan for new government-sponsored savings accounts.

The accounts, which Obama announced tonight in a State of the Union Address that concentrated on expanding economic opportunity, will be available to workers who don’t have access to a 401(k) plan, administration officials said.

The “MyRA” accounts, similar to an individual retirement account, will provide “a new way for working Americans to start their own retirement savings,” Obama said in the text of the speech released by the White House.

Under the initiative, workers would be allowed to have a portion of their pay deducted for deposit into an account invested in U.S. government bonds that would be treated for tax purposes as an individual retirement account, administration officials said.

The accounts, set up through the Treasury Department, would have a maximum balance after which money would have to be rolled over into an IRA, the officials said.

The officials project that millions of Americans will take advantage of the savings accounts.

“This isn’t earth-shattering stuff,” said Brian Graff, the chief executive officer of the American Society of Pension Professionals & Actuaries. “But it is a step in the right direction to get more people saving for retirement, which I would think is a bipartisan issue.”



Existing Authority Obama can establish the savings program under existing executive authority without new legislation, the officials said. He will announce details of the plan tomorrow.

“I don’t expect this to get a lot of pushback,” said Graff, who discussed the proposal in advance with Treasury officials. He said it draws on an existing program that permits workers to purchase U.S. savings bonds through payroll deductions and adds “a retirement twist.”

The proposal resembles an earlier Obama administration plan that would have required employers to offer an automatic IRA option to employees. That plan, which was included in Obama’s 2014 budget, would have cost the government an estimated $17.6 billion in foregone revenue over 10 years.

About 68 percent of U.S. workers had access to retirement benefits as of March 2013, with 54 percent participating, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Company Reaction “Although we don’t have the details yet, Vanguard is generally supportive of expanding savings opportunities for those not covered by a workplace retirement plan,” Linda Wolohan, a spokeswoman for Vanguard Group Inc., said in an e-mail.

Wolohan declined to comment further before hearing the specifics of Obama’s proposal. Vanguard was the second-largest manager of 401(k)-type assets in 2012 behind Fidelity Investments, according to researcher Cerulli Associates.

Fidelity, which is also the largest provider of IRAs, declined to comment before hearing the speech, according to an e-mail from spokeswoman Eileen O’Connor.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), which manages retirement assets and administers plans, declined to comment before seeing more details, Gregory Roth, a spokesman for the bank, said in an e-mail.

Under the proposal, proceeds couldn’t be cashed out without a tax penalty until the depositor reaches retirement age, unlike ordinary savings-bond purchases, Graff said. The funds could be transferred to an ordinary IRA without penalty, he said.

Access Lacking One of the biggest challenges for the U.S. retirement system is that many workers don’t have access to a pension or 401(k) plan through their employer, said Lisa Mensah, executive director of the initiative on financial security at the Aspen Institute.

“We have to get people in,” Mensah said. “You do need an automated way for people to get into the savings system.”

Small-business groups in the past have opposed such proposals because they say that setting up the required payroll deduction would be a cost for them.

U.S. savings bonds designed for retirement accounts have been proposed in the past and termed R-bonds, said Don Fuerst, an actuary and senior pension fellow at the American Academy of Actuaries.

The securities are seen as a way to allow low-income workers to save for retirement, Fuerst said. They usually can’t contribute much at the start, making their balances expensive to administer and vulnerable to investment-management costs.

‘Small Amount’ “If you’re only putting a small amount into the plan the fees could eat up your investment income,” said Fuerst, who is based in Washington. “This gets around that.”

With savings bonds the U.S. government could issue the investments and cover the costs of keeping track of them, he said.

The accounts aren’t as attractive as a typical employer-sponsored 401(k) because there is no employer match and only one investment option, Graff said.

Even so, he said, it may significantly boost retirement savings for middle- and low-income workers who don’t have access to a 401(k) account, Graff said.

Research has shown that middle- and moderate-income workers are likely to save for retirement when they can do so with a payroll deduction and are unlikely to do so when they don’t have that option, Graff said.

Among workers earning between $30,000 and $50,000 a year, 72 percent of those covered by an employer-sponsored payroll deduction retirement plan such as a 401(k) participate, while only 5 percent of those without such a plan set aside money through an individual retirement account, according to a 2010 analysis by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

Participation in the Obama retirement savings program would be voluntary, Graff said.

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How do we get the retirement for which we worked and paid?  Expand Social Security by doubling monthly payments moving seniors out of poverty by taxing the rich taking our retirement wealth through fraud!!



Make Wealthy Pay Social Security Taxes on Their Full Salaries -- and Retirement Benefits Could Likely Be Expanded for All MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

According to RT.com, the 900 wealthiest Americans paid their full Social Security tax obligation for 2014 by January 2nd.

How is that possible?

As BuzzFlash at Truthout has pointed out before, there is an inexplicable cap on collecting Social Security tax above an income of $117,000 a year.  Most payrolled Americans pay 6.2 percent of their income into the Social Security Trust Fund (the employer pays another 6.2 percent).  But if you are a high-flying CEO who earns $50 million a year, $49,883,000 of your income is exempt from Social Security taxes.

If the wealthy paid Social Security taxes on their full salaries (and we aren't even talking stock options and other forms of bonuses that are not subject to Social Security taxation) the Social Security Trust Fund would likely be able to expand benefits.  This would be a far cry from the ongoing right wing -- and White House -- efforts to reach a "grand bargain" on cutting Social Security benefits (even though there is no immediate crisis and any problems that do exist largely result from the government borrowing from the fund).

As noted in the RT.com article:

Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor at the New School for Social Research, wrote that if everyone eligible paid all year long, “the Social security system would be solvent indefinitely and they [the plutocrats] still would be the richest and prettiest in all the land.”

As BuzzFlash at Truthout has pointed out many a time, the average monthly Social Security check for a retiree is just $1,269 -- and the recipient earned that many by paying into the fund. (Skeptics should note that the source of the average monthly check is the Social Security Administration.) An important point that we repeat in every article about Social Security is that it is not an "entitlement"; it is an earned pension plan.

Most of those CEOs who have already paid their full Social Security obligation for the year, based on the $117,000 income taxation cap, also receive stock options and other benefits.  As Teresa Ghilarducci implied, they would probably not even notice a ding in their fortunes if they paid their full fair share of Social Security taxes.

Those of us who pay Social Security through December 31st don't get the breaks and subsidies that the wealthy do.  We notice the Social Security and Medicare taxes removed from our paychecks (FICA) because we need to budget our earnings.

Not so for the wealthiest in the land, who get tax break after tax break -- and would rather have the elderly eat cat food than have to buy a third yacht that doesn't have a sauna in it.

When a nation values the accumulation of wealth over the welfare of its citizens, it has lost its soul.  So it goes with corporate honchos and their legal right to have the vast majority of their income untaxed by Social Security.



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Do not allow neo-liberals to frame this issue as a redistribution of wealth-----recovering massive fraud sent to the rich is simply justice!!!!

WE HAVE HAD TENS OF TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN CORPORATE FRAUD OVER THIS PAST DECADE AND HAVING THE AFFLUENT PAY MORE IS NOT A REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH----IT IS JUSTICE!

Social Security: Expand it After staving off Obama's plan to cut benefits, progressives are fighting to boost checks to seniors

Alex Seitz-Wald  Salon
Thanks in part to their effort, along with Republican recalcitrance and changing economic realities, Democrats have abandoned any plans to mess with the social safety net, at least for the moment. The federal deficit has fallen precipitously this year  – Treasury actually ran a surplus in June — and with it, the impetus for a “grand bargain” trading safety net cuts for increased tax revenue has evaporated. (This may have been the White House’s plan all along.)

Now, as Obama prepares to deliver a major speech on the economy today, the scrappy activists who were until recently playing defense against cuts are turning around and pushing to increase Social Security benefits.

“Social Security is the most effective anti-poverty program in history. Forget cutting it — we need to double down on success and make it even stronger,” Jim Dean, the chair of Democracy for America, will say in an email to supporters today.

The coalition of leading progressive groups, including the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America, Credo Action, MoveOn.org, Progressives United and Social Security Works, are joining together to back a plan introduced by Democratic Sens. Tom Harkin and Mark Begich to boost benefits and shore up Social Security’s finances for the better part of the next century.

These kinds of economic justice issues are Harkin’s bread and butter, but Begich, who is up for reelection this year in deep-red Alaska, is an interesting addition. In May, he made a splash by breaking with Obama on Social Security cuts. His leadership on this issue suggests he thinks expanding the social safety net will not only not hurt him, but actually help him politically, even in one of the most Republican states in the union.

And there’s reason to believe he’s right — Social Security is overwhelmingly popular. A new PPP poll commissioned by DFA and the PCCC found that 51 percent of Kentucky voters support the Harkin-Begich framework, which would boost benefits for 75-year-old workers by $452 per year and by $807 per year for 85-year-olds. Twenty-four percent said they didn’t support the plan, and another 24 said they weren’t sure.

Obama’s budget called for changing the way inflation is calculated for Social Security by switching to the “chained CPI” (consumer price index) formula, which would have the effect of reducing benefits. Begich and Harkin have each introduced slightly different plans, but both would also change the inflation formula. Their change, however, to the “CPI-E,” better accounts for the fact that seniors spend disproportionate amounts of their income on health care, the price of which grows faster than the price of goods overall.

To pay for this expansion, and to ensure the solvency of all of Social Security for decades into the future, the plan would eliminate the income cap on Social Security FICA taxes. Currently, income above $113,700 is exempt from the tax, meaning someone who makes $1 million a year pays the tax on only about a tenth of their income. The new poll commissioned by the groups found that 62 percent of Kentuckians support removing the cap, while 20 percent oppose it and another 18 percent are unsure.

Some liberals have criticized the idea of removing the cap, arguing that it would undermine the political strength of Social Security by making the plan more of a redistributional welfare system than a social insurance scheme. But others point out that the cap means the current Social Security tax is regressive, charging poor and middle-class Americans a larger portion of their income than millionaires and billionaires.

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It is Obama who gave no COLA for a few years and now only 1%....the largest loss of money for payments in Social Security ever. We all know inflation is higher than the 1-2% the FED says. Obama has never acknowledged as well that Reagan tripled payroll taxes in 1980s so baby boomers would not have shortfalls in these Trusts.

THERE IS NO SHORTFALL.....JUST AN ATTEMPT TO TAKE THESE RETIREMENT FUNDS AS WELL!!

The FED artificially keeps inflation near 0%....this has never before been done.....and no one thinks it is really at 1-2%. So, Obama chooses Bernanke who states inflation is at 0% even as everyone pays more for most consumption. If Obama questioned that inflation number, the FED would not get away with giving this inflation number.

Isn't it odd that since the 1970s an average of 4% COLA each year....that is a great big difference.


Social Security Administration:

WASHINGTON – Social Security recipients will get a raise in January -- their first increase in benefits since 2009. It's expected to be about 3.5 percent.

Congress adopted the measure in the 1970s, and since then it has resulted in annual benefit increases averaging 4.2 percent. But there was no COLA in 2010 or 2011 because inflation was too low. That was small comfort to the millions of retirees and disabled people who have seen retirement accounts dwindle and home values drop during the period of economic weakness, said David Certner, legislative policy director for the AARP.

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This article describes well the history of fully funding the Trusts and the deliberate raiding of these funds for corporate profit.  We need that money back in the Trusts and expanding the program will allow for all the other corporate frauds to be recovered indirectly!


Ronald Reagan and The Great Social Security Heist by Allen W. Smith, Ph.D. | October 11, 2013         FedSmith.com  

Ronald Reagan was one of the most popular presidents in modern history. As a former Hollywood actor, he had an uncommon degree of charisma. The conservatives absolutely loved Reagan for his efforts to reduce the size of government, but most liberals hated him with a passion. Reagan is still revered by a lot of Americans. This reverence for Ronald Reagan helps to explain how he was able to fool most of the American people to a degree unparalleled by any other modern president. With the help of Alan Greenspan, Reagan pulled off one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated against the American people.

It is so ironic that many people, today, still believe that Ronald Reagan came galloping up on a great white horse to sound the alarm that Social Security was in deep financial trouble. He then allegedly figured out a solution to the problem and rammed his legislative proposal through Congress in a three-month period. On April 20, 1983, the signing ceremony for the new legislation took place with great fanfare. Below are some of Reagan’s remarks at the signing ceremony.

This bill demonstrates for all time our nation’s ironclad commitment to social security. It assures the elderly that America will always keep the promises made in troubled times a half a century ago. It assures those who are still working that they, too, have a pact with the future. From this day forward, they have our pledge that they will get their fair share of benefits when they retire…

Today, all of us can look each other square in the eye and say, “We kept our promises.” We promised that we would protect the financial integrity of social security. We have. We promised that we would protect beneficiaries against any loss in current benefits. We have. And we promised to attend to the needs of those still working, not only those Americans nearing retirement but young people just entering the labor force. And we’ve done that, too…

Instead of being a proud day for America, April 20, 1983, has become a day of shame. The Social Security Amendments of 1983 laid the foundation for 30-years of federal embezzlement of Social Security money in order to use the money to pay for wars, tax cuts and other government programs. The payroll tax hike of 1983 generated a total of $2.7 trillion in surplus Social Security revenue. This surplus revenue was supposed to be saved and invested in marketable U.S. Treasury bonds that would be held in the trust fund until the baby boomers began to retire in about 2010. But not one dime of that money went to Social Security.

The 1983 legislation was sold to the public, and to the Congress, as a long-term fix for Social Security. The payroll tax hike was designed to generate large Social Security surpluses for 30 years, which would be set aside to cover the increased cost of paying benefits when the boomers retired.

Let’s have a look at the events leading up to this proposal. Reagan and the government had big financial problems. Supply-side economics was not working like Reagan had promised. Instead of the lower tax rates generating more revenue as the supply-siders claimed would happen, there was a dramatic drop in revenue. Something had to be done, so Ronald Reagan set for himself a new mission. He would have to figure out a way to get the additional revenue he needed from another source.

The mechanism, which allowed the government to transfer $2.7 trillion from the Social Security fund to the general fund over a 30-year period, was the brainchild of President Ronald Reagan and his advisers, especially Alan Greenspan. Greenspan played a key role in convincing Congress and the public to support a hike in the payroll tax. A few years later, Reagan appointed Greenspan to become Chairman of the Federal Reserve System. Since Greenspan’s new job was one of the most coveted positions in Washington, many observers have wondered whether or not this appointment represented, at least in part, payback for the role Greenspan had played in making vast sums of new revenue available to the government.

President Reagan and his advisors knew, from the very beginning, that the government would soon face a severe cash shortage. Budget Director, David Stockman, had deliberately rigged the computer at the Office of Management and Budget to generate bogus revenue forecasts in an effort to convince Congress to enact Reagan’s unaffordable proposed tax cuts. When Stockman first fed the data from Reagan’s economic proposals into the computer, he was shocked. The computer forecast that, if Reagan’s proposals were enacted into law, massive budget deficits would loom ahead for as far as the eye could see.

Reagan needed a new source of revenue to replace the revenue lost as a result of his unaffordable income tax cuts. He wasn’t about to rescind any of his income-tax cuts, but he had another idea. What about raising the payroll tax, and then channeling the new revenue to the general fund, from where it could be spent for other purposes? An increase in Social Security taxes would be easier to enact than a hike in income tax rates, and it would leave his income tax cuts undisturbed. Reagan’s first step in implementing his strategy was to write to Congressional leaders. His first letter, dated May 21, 1981 included the following:

As you know, the Social Security System is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy…in the decades ahead its unfunded obligations could run well into the trillions. Unless we in government are willing to act, a sword of Damocles will soon hang over the welfare of millions of our citizens.

Reagan wrote a follow-up letter to Congressional leaders dated July 18, 1981, which included:

“The highest priority of my Administration is restoring the integrity of the Social Security System. Those 35 million Americans who depend on Social Security expect and are entitled to prompt bipartisan action to resolve the current financial problem.

Social Security was definitely not “teetering on the edge of bankruptcy” in 1981 as Reagan claimed in his letter to Congressional leaders. The 1983 National Commission on Social Security Reform, headed by Alan Greenspan, issued its “findings and recommendations” in January 1983. The Commission accurately foresaw major problems for Social Security when the baby boomers began to retire in about 2010. But that was nearly two decades down the road. In addition to the long-term problem of the baby boomers, the Commission found a possible short-term problem for the years 1983-89. But the outlook improved and became favorable for the 1900s and early 2000s. The possible minor problem for the years 1983-1989 was based on very pessimistic economic assumptions. So, at the time Reagan informed Congressional leaders that Social Security was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the actual condition of Social Security funding was fairly sound for the next two decades.

Furthermore, Social Security was certainly not Reagan’s “highest priority.” Reagan had never been a friend of Social Security. He was a hardliner when it came to all government social programs. He called unemployment insurance “a prepaid vacation plan for freeloaders.” He said the progressive income tax was “ a brainchild of Karl Marx.” And, he called welfare recipients “a faceless mass waiting for handouts.” Reagan referred to Social Security as a “welfare program” and, during the 1976 Republican Presidential Primary, Reagan proposed making Social Security voluntary, which would have essentially destroyed the program. There is no way that anyone who knew Reagan’s record would accept his claim that Social Security was his highest priority. He had always wanted the program eliminated, or at least privatized.

Reagan’s scare tactics worked. Congress passed the Social Security Amendments of 1983, which included a hefty increase in the payroll tax rate. The tax increase was designed to generate large Social Security surpluses for the next 30 years. The public was led to believe that the surplus money would be saved and invested in marketable U.S. Treasury Bonds, which could later be resold to raise cash with which to pay benefits to the boomers. But that didn’t happen. The money was all deposited directly into the general fund and used for non-Social Security purposes. Reagan spent every dime of the surplus Social Security revenue, which came in during his presidency, on general government operations. His successor, George H.W. Bush, used the surplus money as a giant slush fund, and both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush looted and spent all of the Social Security surplus revenue that flowed in during their presidencies. So we can’t blame the whole problem on Reagan. Reagan was the one who figured out a way to use Social Security money as general revenue, and his successors just followed his example.

The $2.7 trillion, which is alleged to be in the trust fund, was all spent for wars, tax cuts for the rich, and other government programs. If the money is repaid at some point in the future, we could say is was just “borrowed.” But no arrangements have been made to repay the money, and nobody in government is suggesting that the money should be repaid. So, if it is never repaid, the money will definitely have been stolen.

This would not be such a serious problem if Social Security was still running annual surpluses. But Social Security ran it last annual surplus in 2009, and began running permanent annual deficits in 2010. The cost of paying full Social Security benefits for 2010 exceeded Social Security’s total tax revenue by $49 billion. So how did the government pay full Social Security benefits in 2010? They borrowed $49 billion from China, or one of our other creditors. And the amount that will have to be borrowed in future years will become larger and larger. If the trust fund had not been looted, there would be $2.7 trillion of marketable U.S. Treasury bonds in the fund that could be sold in the open market for cash. But the trust fund doesn’t hold a dime’s worth of marketable real assets of any kind.

That’s why President Obama warned during the debt-ceiling crisis of 2011 that Social Security checks could not go out on time unless the dispute was settled, because “their might not be enough money in the coffers.” The grandiose lie that the Social Security Administration, the AARP, and the NCPSSM, repeatedly tells the public is outrageous. They continue to say that Social Security has enough money to pay full benefits for another 20 years without any government action, when Social Security cannot pay full benefits for a single year without borrowing money. The IOUs in the trust fund are not marketable, and they have no monetary value. They are worthless!

We can easily understand why the SSA continues to repeat the big lie. That is what they are told to do by top government officials, who are trying to keep the Social Security theft a secret from the public. But why do the senior organizations continue to repeat the lie? They are supposed to be representing the best interests of their members, but, in my opinion, they are betraying their members.

So the great Social Security fraud, which began under Ronald Reagan in 1981, is still alive and well 32 years after it began. Republican and Democrat presidents and Republican and Democrat members of Congress, all share in the blame. There is nothing broken about Social Security. If the government had not stolen $2.7 trillion from Social Security, or, if the government would make arrangements to repay the stolen money, Social Security would be able to pay full benefits for at least 20 more years without any other action. But crooked politicians, who do not want to repay the money, are trying to convince the public that Social Security is a flawed system, which needs to be replaced with private accounts.

Social Security is a sound program that has worked well for more than 75 years. It ain’t broke, so why try to fix it? The government—not Social Security—is what is broken and needs to be fixed. It is time for the American people to stand their ground and fire the crooked politicians. President Obama, and every member of Congress know that everything in this article is true. But they have succeeded in fooling the people for three decades and seem to think they can continue to do so. Don’t let them get by with it!


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Third Way is the neo-liberal think tank and you see here how they are working with republicans to pretend that Social Security and the entitlement Trusts are unsustainable when in fact they have simply been gutted with fraud and raiding!

Elizabeth Warren Calls Third Way 'Flatly Wrong' In Social Security Fight

Posted: 12/05/2013 2:45 pm EST  |  Updated: 12/05/2013 4:37 pm EST

  WASHINGTON -- Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) took aim at the corporate-backed think tank Third Way on Thursday, deepening her feud with the group that attacked her Social Security plan in the Wall Street Journal.

The WSJ op-ed said that Warren was ignoring Social Security's "undebatable solvency crisis."

"It's just flatly wrong," Warren said of Third Way's critique. "We could make modest adjustments and make the system financially stable for a century, and we could make somewhat larger adjustments and make the system pay more for seniors who rely on it ... The conversation for too long has been about whether to cut Social Security benefits a little bit or a lot. And that is flatly the wrong debate to have in mind."

Warren made her comments in an interview with HuffPost as members of Congress on Third Way's board faced questions about their support of the group's attack. "The Social Security system is not adding to the debt at all," she said. "More importantly, if we made no changes at all, Social Security would pay out at its current level for about 20 years, at which point it would drop by about 25 percent and pay out forever into the future."

Warren responded to Third Way earlier this week by challenging Wall Street banks to be transparent about donations they have made to think tanks.

The Massachusetts Democrat said that Wall Street's push to cut Social Security is part of a broader agenda. "It's part of the larger issue about a rigged playing field. They don't wanna pay more, they don't wanna pay a fair share. I believe everybody should pay a fair share," she said. "That's how we make sure people can retire with dignity. That's not what Wall Street wants to do."

Third Way's spokesman responded by saying that under Warren's plan, Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase's CEO, would be entitled to a higher Social Security payout.

"Oh please. I'm out there working for Jamie Dimon the same way Dick Cheney is out there trying to save the environment," Warren said.

"I believe that we need to be talking about how we can expand Social Security benefits," she continued. "We need to keep in mind that two-thirds of seniors rely on Social Security to put groceries on the table and for 14 million seniors, Social Security is all that stands between them and poverty."

Jim Kessler, one of the co-authors of the WSJ op-ed and a senior official at Third Way, said that Warren's plan was an unwise use of limited resources.

"The plan that Senator Warren supports would raise benefits for every single retiree whether they contributed more money into the Trust Fund or not. With the coming retirement of the baby boomers, is that really how we want to spend limited federal dollars? Over the next two decades, the number of people over the age of 65 will increase by 80% while the number of working age people who fund them will increase by just 8%," Kessler said in an email. "Meanwhile, if you look at the senior population today, 3 million senior citizen households -- one of every nine senior households -- earned more than $100,000 in income, according to the Census Bureau. Why are we raising their benefits? It would be one thing if we had a lot of taxpayer dollars to spare and could do this, plus cover Medicare, and invest in schools, research, infrastructure, and the like. But it hasn’t worked that way in the past and it’s hard to imagine it working that way in the future. It may be popular to give every senior citizen a benefit hike, but it will come at the expensive of other spending. That’s a certainty."

Warren's plan, meanwhile, would raise Social Security taxes on those making more than the current cap of roughly $113,000, and so while such seniors would receive more, they would pay more as well.

The story has been updated with comment from Jim Kessler, a co-author of the Wall Street Journal op-ed.




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This is an excellent look at CPI and the use of it for COLA calculations.  This article comes from a corporate view that saving the government money on these social payouts is the goal rather than making sure people get what they need to meet real inflation.  You see at the end it is Chain CPI that gives the lowest COLA and you see as well that the major categories for inflationary cost are not reflected accurately in CPI models.  We all understand that fuel, medical care, and education are not falling into a 1-2% inflationary rate!

CONNECTING SOCIAL SECURITY TO CHAIN CPI IS ONLY ABOUT LOWERING COLA INCREASES THAT ARE ALREADY TOO LOW!!!!!!

'The graph above demonstrates that fuel costs, medical care, and school costs are increasing at a much faster pace than the headline CPI-U'.


July 2013
CPI Inflation Continues to Grow
Posted on 15 August 2013 by Steven Hansen by Doug Short and Steven Hansen

The July 2013 Consumer Price Index (CPI-U) year-over-year inflation rate again rose with energy continuing to drive inflation.





The July 2013 Consumer Price Index (CPI-U) year-over-year inflation rate again rose from 1.7% to 2.0% . Core inflation (CPI less food and energy) increased from 1.6% to 1.7%.

The dynamics were that energy costs were the big driver this month with minor supporting roles from apparel. All others were mixed.

The Producer Price Index (earlier this week) showed finished goods fell from 2.5% in June to 2.1% in July 2013. It is seldom that the CPI is lower than the PPI.

Percent Change Year-over-Year – Comparing PPI Finished Goods (blue line) to PPI Crude Materials (red line)

As a generalization – inflation accelerates as the economy heats up, while inflation rate falling could be an indicator that the economy is cooling. However, inflation does not correlate well to the economy – and cannot be used as a economic indicator.

Energy by far was the major influence on this month’s CPI.

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.2 percent in July on a seasonally adjusted basis, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 2.0 percent before seasonal adjustment.

The rise in the seasonally adjusted all items index was the result of increases in a broad array of indexes including shelter, gasoline, apparel, and food. Despite the gasoline increase, the energy index rose only 0.2 percent as the natural gas and electricity indexes declined. The increase in the food index was caused by a sharp rise in the fruits and vegetables index; other food indexes were mixed.

The index for all items less food and energy rose 0.2 percent in July, the third straight such increase. Along with the advances in the shelter and apparel indexes, the indexes for medical care, tobacco, and new vehicles all rose. In contrast, the indexes for household furnishings and operations, airline fares, and used cars and trucks all declined in July.

The all items index increased 2.0 percent over the last 12 months. The index for all items less food and energy has risen 1.7 percent over the last year; this compares to 1.6 percent for the 12 months ending June. The energy index has risen 4.7 percent over the last 12 months, its largest increase since the 12 months ending February 2012. The food index has risen 1.4 percent, the same figure as in May and June.

Historically, the CPI-U general index tends to correlate over time with the CPI-U’s food index. The current situation is putting an upward pressure on the CPI countering the downward pressure on the CPI by the Producer Price Index.

CPI-U Index compared to the Food sub-Index of CPI-U

Notice the gap in the above graphic between the CPI and Food – historically this gap has always closed when the knock-on effect from higher food prices into other CPI components moderates.

The market expected month-over-month CPI-U growth at 0.2% (versus 0.2% actual), with the core inflation expectations at 0.2% (versus 0.2% actual).

The Federal Reserve has argued that energy inflation automatically slows the economy without having to intervene with its monetary policy tools. This is the primary reason the Fed wants to exclude energy from analysis of consumer price increases (the inflation rate).



/images/z cpi1.png

In the above chart – the green boxes are elements moderating inflation, while the red boxed items are fueling inflation. And the graph below looks at the different price changes seen by the BEA in this PCE release versus the BEA’s GDP and BLS’s Consumer Price Index (CPI).

Year-over-Year Change – PCE’s Price Index (blue line) versus CPI-U (red line) versus GDP Deflator (green line) Detailed Analysis The first chart is an overlay of Headline CPI and Core CPI (the latter excludes Food and Energy) since 1957. The second chart gives a close-up of the two since 2000.



On the chart below I’ve highlighted 2 to 2.5 percent range. Two percent has generally been understood to be the Fed’s target for core inflation. However, the December 12 FOMC meeting raised the inflation ceiling to 2.5% for the next year or two while their accommodative measures (low Fed Funds Rate and quantitative easing) are in place.



Federal Reserve policy, which has historically focused on core inflation, and especially the core Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE), will see that the latest core CPI is below the near-term target range of 2 to 2.5 percent, and the more volatile headline inflation, is well below the target range.

Caveats on the Use of the Consumer Price Index Econintersect has performed several tests on this series and finds it fairly representative of price changes (inflation). However, the headline rate is an average – and will not correspond to the price changes seen by any specific person or on a particular subject.

Although the CPI represents the costs of some mythical person. Each of us need to provide a multiplier to the BLS numbers to make this index representative of our individual situation. This mythical person envisioned spending pattern would be approximately:



The average Joe Sixpack budgets to spend his entire paycheck or retirement income – so even small changes have a large impact to a budget.



The graph above demonstrates that fuel costs, medical care, and school costs are increasing at a much faster pace than the headline CPI-U.

The Consumer Price Index for Urban Consumers (CPI-U, or more generally CPI) is the most familiar gauge of inflation in the US. The data for the non-seasonally adjusted series stretches back a century to January 1913. But the news of late is about a relative newcomer to the inflation metrics of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Chained CPI for Urban Consumers (C-CPI-U). The BLS has a Frequently Asked Questions page on the Chained CPI that’s been around for a while. At present the page footer says “Last Modified Date: April 6, 2005″.

The reason the Chained CPI has been a hot topic in the news is that it’s being proposed as the method for determining cost of living adjustments for Social Security. Here are some typical examples of topic in the popular press:

• Chained CPI and You: A Primer (Atlantic Wire)
• Why ‘Chained CPI’ Rattles the Elderly (and Soon to Be) (Businessweek)
• How ‘Chained CPI’ Will Hit Your Pocketbook (Daily Finance)
• What’s the Chained CPI? (AARP)
• Seniors would see smaller Social Security checks under Obama budget (CNN Money)

For a snapshot comparison of how the conventional CPI and Chained CPI stack up against each other, I’ve created a variation on the CPI chart I’ve been updating monthly for the past several years here. The chart illustrates the overall change in inflation for CPI, Core CPI, and the eight top-level components of CPI since the turn of the century (more here). I also include energy, which is a collection of subcomponents, and College Tuition and Fees, a subcomponent of one of the top eight.

The BLS has published the data for these metrics for chained CPI from December 1999. The one missing element is College Tuition and Fees, a subcomponent of Education and Communication. The chart below pairs the two versions of each component showing the total change since December 1999. We can thus have a more educated sense of how the Chained CPI and conventional CPI differ from one another.


  Here is a bottom line comparison: Since December of 1999, the average year-over-year inflation calculated monthly based on the conventional CPI has been 2.41%. For equivalent calculation for the Chained CPI it is 2.15%, a difference of 0.26%.

The calculation for the Social Security COLA, however, is based on a different CPI series, the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, usually referred to as the CPI-W. Since December of 2000, the year-over-year average for CPI-W is fractionally higher than YoY CPI at 2.45%, which is 0.30% higher than the YoY average for Chained CPI.

Here is a snapshot that compares the cumulative effect of inflation with these three indexes:

Over time the proposed switch to the Chained CPI for Social Security COLAs will substantially lower the cost to government … and the size of payouts to recipients.

The Consumer Price Index contains hundreds of sub-indices which should be used to show price changes for a particular subject.

Because of the nuances in determining the month-over-month index values, the year-over-year or annual change in the Consumer Price Index is preferred for comparisons.

Econintersect has analyzed both food and energy showing that food moves synchronously with core.

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Let's remember, it is the neo-liberals on Capitol Hill pushing this as compromise in entitlement and Social Security 'reform' takes the lead since the Treasury is empty of the $4 trillion in payroll taxes paid since Reagan's time!!

Seniors would see smaller Social Security checks under Obama budget

By Tami Luhby  @Luhby April 10, 2013: 4:50 PM ET  CNN MONEY

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) Senior citizens would see their Social Security checks shrink under President Obama's latest budget proposal. The budget plan, released Wednesday, calls for changing the way the annual cost of living adjustments for Social Security and other federal programs are calculated. Shifting to "chained CPI" from the current inflation measure could reduce the federal debt by $230 billion, but it would also mean that seniors would get smaller increases in their Social Security payments each year.

The president's proposal would provide protections for the oldest seniors, low-income seniors and veterans, and those who are disabled. Seniors ages 76 to 85 would receive a supplemental payment annually to offset some of the slowdown in growth. Also, programs that are geared for those in or near poverty, such as the Supplemental Security Income, would be exempt from the switch to chained CPI.

But the change would still make a difference for many people. Chained CPI is expected to grow between 0.25 and 0.3 percentage points more slowly than the current CPI measure.

Initially, the reduction in the growth of Social Security checks would be quite small ... between $38 and $45 in the first year, for the average retired worker. But over time, that would grow into the hundreds of dollars.

Someone who started collecting the average Social Security benefit for a retired worker in 1999 would receive $12,972 in 2012. But let's say the Social Security Administration had already been using chained CPI -- that person would get only $12,336 this year, according to the National Academy of Social Insurance. That's nearly 5% less.

The difference gets bigger over time. According to the National Women's Law Center, a retiree who was collecting $17,520 last year would see 6.5% less, or $1,139, by age 85, if chained CPI were in effect. A decade after, their payments would be 9.2% smaller, or $1,612. These calculations do not include the supplemental payments, the details of which were not released until Wednesday.


For many seniors, these decreases aren't trivial. Nearly two in three recipients rely on Social Security for at least 50% of their income. And Social Security makes up at least 90% of the income received by 36% of seniors.

"For a lot of elderly people, Social Security is virtually their only source of income," said Paul Van de Water, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "A decrease of almost $600 a year ... for people in that situation is very significant."

That's especially true for older seniors, who have likely spent down their other assets and seen other income sources dry up. Also, these recipients are usually contending with growing medical bills, which chained CPI doesn't account for. The protections Obama is planning may mitigate the problems, but some experts don't think they'll fully shield this group.

  Krugman: Focus on deficit is 'destructive' "The older you get, the bigger the reduction you get,' said Gary Koenig, director of economic security for AARP's Public Policy Institute. "It's hitting at a time when folks can least afford it."

Women could get hit especially hard since they live longer than men and rely more on Social Security, said Joan Entmacher, vice president for family economic security for the National Women's Law Center. For the typical single elderly woman, the switch would reduce her monthly benefit by $56 at age 80, not including the supplement. This is equivalent to a week's spending on food per month.

"The typical woman beneficiary is just barely above the poverty line," she said. "She has a really hard time meeting expenses."

Regardless of what one thinks of the magnitude of the cuts, switching to chained CPI is not the solution to reforming Social Security. Additional measures will be needed to extend the entitlement program's solvency since chained CPI addresses only about 20% of the gap.

And Peter Orszag, former budget director under Obama, says the difference between chained CPI and the current CPI is overstated -- that means Social Security benefits won't be cut by as much as is being forecast.

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Social Security beneficiaries to get 1.5 percent raise


Eileen Ambrose 10:18 a.m. EDT, October 30, 2013

Social Security beneficiaries will receive a 1.5 percent raise next year, the Social Security Administration announced today. Also, the agency announced that the amount of earnings subject to the Social Security tax is going up next year from $113,700 to $117,000.

According to the National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare, the typical beneficiary will receive a $19 per month raise.

“Seniors know all too well, their living costs often outpace the COLA increase and a 1.5% increase is anything but too generous,” said Max Richtman, president and CEO of the group.

The increase comes at a time when lawmakers are likely to take up whether to change how the government measures inflation as part of budget negotiations.

Some economists say the current yardstick overstates inflation. The result is that the government collects less in taxes than it should because income levels for tax brackets and deductions are higher than they should be, economists say. And, they add, the overstatement of inflation means that Social Security pays more to beneficiaries than it should, too.

Republicans have backed moving to the so-called Chained Consumer Price Index that tends to report inflation at a lower rate. This index takes into account that consumers will make substitutions when prices rise, such as switching from high-priced strawberries in the fall to cheaper pears.

President Obama has signaled his willingness to go along, provided seniors get periodic bump-up in benefits and other guarantees.


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Below is the Brookings Institute policy on entitlement and Social Security reform.  They think that now that these Trusts have been gutted with fraud, reforms are needed to cut American's retirements.  Note that the Brookings is the neo-liberal think tank that Clinton and Obama and all of democratic leadership subscribe to.  See why you hear all this manufactured crisis meant to hide what was always the planned policy?!


The Simple Arithmetic of Diverting Payroll Taxes to Individual Accounts

Many people favor the creation of individual accounts as a partial or complete substitute for Social Security. Some propose to fund these accounts out of general revenues. When some part of the pensions based on these individual accounts is used to reduce Social Security benefits, this approach can indirectly reduce the projected long-term deficit in Social Security. This is the approach used, for example, in the Archer/Shaw bill.

Other so-called "carve-out" plans, such as those of Senator Kerry and Governor Bush, would divert part of the current payroll tax from the Social Security system. Their plans would carve out part of the payroll tax, which would then be directed to individual accounts. They would cut Social Security benefits enough to restore projected long-term balance.

The first point to recognize is that by subtracting revenues from the Social Security system, these plans force larger cuts than would otherwise be necessary to restore financial balance in that system. On the other hand, pensioners would have the balances in their individual accounts with which they could (or, in some plans, would have to) buy annuities.

This trade raises several practical questions:

Will the individual-account-based pensions fully compensate pensioners for the Social Security cuts?

Will the individual-account-based pensions be inflation protected?

Will individual account holders be required to convert their accounts into annuities? If not, what happens to those who are imprudent or unlucky, exhaust their accounts, and find themselves dependent on much-reduced Social Security benefits.



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OBAMA ADOPTS ROMNEY'S HEALTH CARE REFORM AND NOW WANTS HIS IDEAS FOR SOCIAL SECURITY REFORM.....Remember, payroll taxes were sent to the US Treasury rather that the Trusts since REagan's time.  Reagan tripled payroll taxes so there would be plenty to cover the baby boomers.  It was corporation's like Romney's that raided the Treasury with fraud.

This is why Obama wants Romney on this commission!


September 30, 2013, 9:08 pm

Obama Selects Romney Adviser for Social Security Commission
By ASHLEY SOUTHALL

President Obama announced on Monday that he planned to nominate Lanhee J. Chen, the top policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, to fill an opening on an independent federal panel whose task is to recommend improvements to Social Security.

The announcement of Mr. Chen’s nomination was peculiarly timed, just a day before the health insurances marketplaces created under the Affordable Care Act — which Mr. Chen has argued should be repealed — can begin accepting customers.

Mr. Chen, 35, was born in North Carolina to parents who immigrated from Taiwan. He earned four degrees from Harvard University, where he was active in Republican politics. He is currently a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of law and public policy at Stanford University.



Mr. Chen, who specializes in health care policy, has worked in academia, campaigns and government, including stints as a health care adviser to the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2004 and as a domestic policy adviser on Mr. Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign. In 2008, he was also a senior counselor to the deputy secretary of Health and Human Services.

In 2010, he was the deputy campaign manager of Steve Poizner’s California gubernatorial campaign for eight months, before leaving in August to become a visiting scholar at the University of California’s Institute of Governmental Studies. He worked four months as the policy director of Mr. Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC, before he was tapped in April to join Mr. Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign as policy director.

Mr. Obama will nominate Mr. Chen to serve on the Social Security Advisory Board, a bipartisan panel of seven experts, who serve six-year terms and must be confirmed by the Senate.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 1, 2013

An earlier version of this post misstated where Lanhee Chen was born. He was born in North Carolina to parents who immigrated from Taiwan; he was not born in Taiwan.






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Remember, Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes have gone to the US Treasury since Reagan and all of that $4 trillion in Trust revenue was stolen through corporate fraud----this is why neo-liberals are pretending to need to 'compromise' over cuts to these Trusts!

Dick Durbin along with Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Steny Hoyer-----all voted down Glass Steagall knowing corporate rule would

Why Democrats Might Cave On Social Security Cuts Posted: 10/20/2013 11:19 am EDT  |  Updated: 10/20/2013 11:24 am EDT  Huffington Post

  WASHINGTON -- Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on Sunday opened the door to Social Security cuts as part of a budget deal with congressional Republicans. But Durbin pushed back against GOP calls for entitlement cuts as the negotiating price to curb or extinguish the economically damaging sequester cuts.

"If this is the bargain that the Republicans are now pushing for, that we have to cut Medicare to avoid cuts at the Department of Defense, they need to take a step back," Durbin said on "Fox News Sunday."

Congress is currently negotiating a new budget, with a December deadline. The talks were mandated by last week's deal to raise the debt ceiling and end the government shutdown.

Also speaking on "Fox News Sunday," Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) explicitly offered up trading some of the short-term cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act, known as the sequester, for long-term Social Security and Medicare cuts. He argued that Republicans had the tactical advantage on such an exchange.

"If you're in a divided government and you're arguing against the law, you're at a disadvantage," Blunt said, noting the failed GOP effort to defund Obamacare that resulted in a government shutdown. "The Budget Control Act is the only thing we've found that actually controls spending."

Blunt said that if Democrats aren't willing to negotiate over "entitlement savings versus some additional spending," to ease the sequester, then Democrats will have to live with the sequester cuts.

Durbin said that Republicans had to put tax revenue on the table to get entitlement cuts. Fox host Chris Wallace noted that Durbin has previously supported entitlement cuts, and asked why Republicans should have to give up tax increases to get something that many Democrats support. President Barack Obama has repeatedly endorsed Social Security cuts as part of budget deals, and Durbin acknowledged that he did support Social Security reforms.

"Social Security is gonna run out of money in 20 years," Durbin said. "The Baby Boom generation is gonna blow away our future. We don't wanna see that happen."

Social Security will not run out of money in 20 years. The program currently enjoys a surplus of more than $2 trillion. Social Security will, however, be unable to pay all benefits at current levels if nothing is changed. If a 25 percent benefit cut were implemented in 20 years, the program would be solvent into the 2080s.

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Do you think a raise of $25 a year which is what this 1% will give most people is meeting Cost of Living?  Of course not......for decades the COLA was 3%.  We need COLA reformed for the better, not lowered by Chain CPI!!


Chained-CPI Supporters Believe This Year's Tiny Social Security Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) Is Too Generous

Posted: 10/17/2013 11:15 am

To ensure that Social Security benefits do not erode over time, they are adjusted every January. Notwithstanding the annual adjustments, those benefits do not keep pace with inflation. Shockingly, rather than make those adjustments more accurate, some politicians support making them more miserly, through a change, known as the "chained CPI" -- a cruel and deceptive benefit cut, hitting hardest the oldest of the old, the poorest, and those disabled at young ages, including our brave wounded warriors.

The 2014 Social Security cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) is scheduled to be released soon by the Department of Labor, though the exact announcement date is uncertain because of the government shutdown. Although the precise COLA adjustment will depend on September's inflation numbers, it will reportedly only be about 1.5 percent. This adjustment will be received by 57 million seniors, workers with disabilities, children who have lost parents and others. This adjustment will also apply to Supplemental Security Income benefits, which provide income for the very poorest elderly and disabled, as well as to a variety of other benefits.

The 2014 COLA, the fourth smallest inflation adjustment since automatic COLAs began in 1975, will be of little help to seniors, people with disabilities, and survivors. Most are already struggling to make ends meet. Medicare premiums, out-of-pocket health and long-term care expenses, housing, food, and other costs keep rising. Those fortunate to have savings have seen those savings shrink, and sometimes disappear. The Great Recession, stagnating wages, job loss, unindexed employee pensions, declines in the value of homes and diminished returns from investments have taken a heavy toll on the old and are contributing to the retirement income crisis facing working Americans. Having their Social Security benefits gradually but inexorably lose value because they do not keep pace with inflation makes it even harder for those on fixed incomes to make ends meet.

Today's Social Security COLA understates inflation experienced by the elderly and people with disabilities. The Bureau of Labor Statistics produces another measure geared to specifically measure the living costs of seniors, called the CPI-E, or experimental Consumer Price Index for the Elderly. It tracks the cost of the basket of goods seniors actually consume, taking into account, among other things, the higher health care costs for seniors. It rises about 0.2 percentage points more per year on average than the current CPI, thereby better protecting beneficiaries against inflation. The higher rate is largely because seniors -- and people with disabilities -- have, on average, higher medical costs, and those costs have been rising more rapidly than other goods and services.

No one is getting rich from Social Security. Benefits are extremely modest, by virtually any standard. But they are vitally important. About two-thirds of seniors rely on Social Security for half or more of their income. As a group, disabled beneficiaries rely on Social Security for a majority of their family income. In short, Social Security beneficiaries have little flexibility in their household budgets. They paid into Social Security throughout their working lives, and have earned a COLA that should keep their benefits at pace with inflation.

Many in Congress seem to think that the Social Security benefits that our seniors and people with disabilities receive today -- under $15,000/year on average -- are too high, and have made cutting them one of their primary goals in Washington's serial budget crises. But as a recent survey from the National Academy of Social Insurance shows, the American people strongly disagree. Seventy-one percent would prefer a package of changes that includes changing to the CPI-E to more accurately reflect the level of inflation experienced by seniors. We wholeheartedly agree, and with the 2014 elections only a year away, Congress would do well to heed their will.

Although many in Congress talk about the need to cut "entitlements" -- an insulting reference to Social Security and Medicare, both earned benefits -- they do not seem to have the courage of their convictions. They propose cutting the COLA through the so-called chained CPI, a technical, hard-to-understand change, rather than say straight-out that they want to pull $127 billion dollars out of the pockets of their constituents over the next 10 years. And even though most politicians have promised not to cut the benefits of persons aged 55 or older, many are fully prepared to break their word.

Fortunately, a growing number of representatives and senators understand that the chained-CPI doesn't pass the "smell test." They aren't sitting back and doing nothing.

• One hundred and twenty five members of the House of Representatives signed onto the resolution sponsored by Representative David Cicilline (D-RI-1) opposing the chained CPI.

• Senators Bernie Sanders (D-VT), Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN-5), Representative Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ-3), Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL-9) and others are outspoken champions of an honest COLA measure.

• Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), Senator Mark Begich (D-AK), Representative Theodore Deutch (D-FL-21) and Representative Linda Sánchez (D-CA-38) are sponsors of bills that would base Social Security's COLAs on the more accurate CPI-E.

It's high time Congress enacted the CPI-E for Social Security and other programs providing benefits to seniors and people with disabilities. Instead though, too many politicians think that next year's COLA, just 1.5 percent, is too high. Everyone who disagrees should find out the position of those running in 2014 -- and make sure that those who don't believe in Social Security are voted out of office.

Nancy Altman, author of The Battle for Social Security , and Eric Kingson, Professor of Social Work at Syracuse University, are Founding Co-Directors of Social Security Work and Co-Chairs of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition . The authors both served as staff to the 1982 National Commission on Social Security Reform (a.k.a. "The Greenspan Commission").

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First, there is not a ground swell of people moving to form Universal Care organizations because they think the ACA is a good policy...and these are democratic base of seniors, labor, and justice.   The ACA is only about creating global health systems that are driven by profit and could care less about care.  These state health systems are being built to throw your Medicare/Medicaid and public sector health plans into, ending all public health programs.  The ACA is a killer for all of War on Poverty and New Deal programs, all policies of the democratic base.

Why are the repub voters the ones shouting the loudest?  Because neo-liberals are selling the ACA as good and many dem voters do not understand that these pols work against them.  They are learning fast.  We need people behind Universal care groups..National Physicians and Health Care Now MD seem to be good groups.

The second issue in this is using the debt ceiling as a reason to hold the economy hostage.  There is no crisis over the debt ceiling.  The Debt Ceiling is unconstitutional says the 14th amendment of the Constitution.  All Obama and Congress need do is ignore the debt ceiling.  Why don't they?  Because they want the government shutdown too...neo-liberals want to pay down the debt with public assets and losing Fed wages and services does that.  THERE IS NO CRISIS--THE DEBT CEILING IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL FOLKS!


On health care, we've got to work together
9:45 a.m. EDT, September 30, 2013 Baltimore Sun

Joseph Ganem says "our personal standard of living depends on the standard of living and well being of all." ("It's all connected," Sept. 25).

Mr. Ganem is an excellent physics teacher, and we should take note of what he says. So many people think they shouldn't listen to the "made-up" stuff scientists say. Who cares about helium? That's for balloons.

I have benefited from teachers, and I am used to smart people taking a long time to say what they mean. Mr. Garnem is a physicist, as was my father, and they actually think about everyone, not just particles.

If we had no helium, we might have no MRI imaging. Physicians would still be examining and diagnosing patients using X-rays, as they did 40 years ago.

So stopping the federal government because legislators are having an outrageous sandbox fight is not going to be all right. All legislators should be for the Affordable Care Act, which helps more citizens get health care and remain productive from age 18 to 65, rather than becoming disabled and having the rest of us paying for their Medicaid or Medicare.

We are not all rich people. We are one big family that gets better when we work together continuously. None of us need to act like we are stuck in the sandbox. Let's talk and work together.

Theodore Houk, Lutherville

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This is coming next.  Obama is ready to pretend that corporate tax rate cuts are needed and will use cuts to social programs to pay for it.  Medicare and Medicaid have already been cut so much that people no longer can access any meaningful level of care.  Social Security has been cut each time Obama gave 0% COLA increases---last year it was 1% after decades of 3% COLA increases that still failed to meet inflation.  So, this is a huge cut to SS benefits that already happened and Obama intends to cut more in deals that are manufactured as 'compromise'. THIS IS HUGE FOLKS....YOU NEO-LIBERAL IN CONGRESS IS WORKING JUST AS HARD AS REPUBLICANS TO END ALL WAR ON POVERTY PROGRAMS.  VOTE THEM OUT BY RUNNING AND VOTING FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!


Richard Eskow writes that an agreement by both sides to cut so-called entitlements of Social Security and Medicare "is a very real possibility. It’s one we should fear – and resist."

Why We Should Fear – and Fight – An Entitlement-Cutting “Grand Bargain”

www.commondreams.org

Americans across the political spectrum strongly support Social Security and
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We are seeing across the country that Congress and neo-liberals are getting ready for the baby boomers and it looks ugly. In Maryland O'Malley has allowed hedge funds to take senior care and we know their motive....profit will not mean quality care. We hear of ever-lower levels of training for health care staff and abusive conditions as a result. THIS IS HAPPENING BECAUSE TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS WERE STOLEN FROM ENTITLEMENT TRUSTS AND MUST BE RECOVERED. We do not want senior care given to Wall Street! Demand Universal Care----expanded Medicare for All

A Problem for an Aging America: Assisted Living

August 18th, 2013
in econ_news, syndication



Econintersect: Recently ProPublica and PBS Frontline have collaborated on an investigation of problems in the large industry of providing assisted living facilities for seniors no longer capapable of living independently. Whether the restrictions inhibiting living alone are physical incapacity or mental degeneration, the prospect of needing such living arrangements may eventually be presented to tens of millions of Americans. And some of the stories associated with the experiences of those who have travelled this road are quite concerning.





Follow up:

A.C. Thompson and Jonathan Jones at ProPublica have worked for over a year to collect evidence of problems in the assisted care industry. A series of comprehensive articles have resulted as well as a PBS Frontline program.  Note: Please click on "Play Again" after starting the video below.




Watch Life and Death in Assisted Living on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Some of the factors that should be considered by those in search of an assisted care residence, according to PBS Frontline, are:

• Making sure that medical support that may be needed is provided;

• When visiting a prospective facility (and always, always, always visit) talk at length with residents and staff;

• Review for-profit facilities especially carefully for risk that maintaining profit margins could impact services;

• Understand what potential extra fees may be in addition to the "sticker price";

• Beware that admission agreements may also be liability waivers for residents;

• Location of a facility is far less important than the quality;

• Review a residence facility with area long-term care ombudsmen.

Read the complete review by James M. Breslow at PBS Frontline from which this list was abstracted.



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AlterNet / By Emily Manuel

Is Your State Stealthily Privatizing Medicaid and Putting Patients at Risk?

Louisiana's Bobby Jindal and other Republican governors are handing over taxpayer dollars to private companies to provide health care--and make profits. August 31, 2011  |           There have long been moves to privatize the management of Medicaid, but with shock-doctrine austerity hawks making as much mileage from their budget crises as possible, this year has seen an especially strong push to privatize the heath care of low-income and disabled Medicaid users at a state level. All across the country in states like Texas, New York, Louisiana, Florida, Illinois, South Carolina and Kentucky, state governments are stealthily privatizing Medicaid by handing over the money they get from the federal government to private contractors -- sometimes with minimal savings to the states themselves. It’s all part of a broader trend called “managed care” or “co-ordinated care” -- deceptively bureaucratic terms for a turn with sometimes deadly consequences for Medicaid patients.

Figures recently published by the  Commonwealth Fund, show that the percentage of people receiving Medicaid who are signed up through publicly traded HMOs has increased nationally from 19.6 percent in 2009 to 27.1 percent in June this year. This is set to increase this year by at least 1.7 million new people, bringing Medicaid patients in privatized health plans to a record 29.8 percent.

In June, California began moving 380,000 older and disabled patients into private plans, while New York will begin moving 1.5 million patients into managed care in October. Further south, Florida is looking to move most of its 3 million Medicaid enrollees into private plans. And with the Affordable Care Act (the recent health care reform law) expected to raise Medicaid enrollment by 16 million by 2019, the Commonwealth Fund concluded that "given recent patterns in state contract awards to managed care plans, it is reasonable to anticipate that plans operated by publicly traded companies will enroll the majority of the expanded Medicaid population."  As a result, the  Washington Post reports that insurers expect $60 billion in new annual revenue from this market after 2014.

As usual, Republican governors are leading the way when it comes to trading public programs for private profits. The most severe move is in Louisiana, where managed care is being brought in without the approval of even the State Legislature. There, Governor Bobby Jindal is unilaterally turning over $2 billion in tax money to contractors to run the Medicaid system, while the savings projected to the state are only $135 million. In a state as poor as Louisiana, even that relatively small savings might seem significant, though the true cost to the state may end up being much greater.  

Research on the over-65 Medicare system has shown that private sector health care is a significantly less efficient use of public funds. A 2009 report delivered by the Bart Stupak-chaired Energy and Commerce Committee found that Medicare spends less than 1 percent on administrative costs and 98 percent on health care, while HMOs eat up 15 percent of their revenue on profits, marketing and other corporate expenses. As with Medicare, the privatization of Medicaid through managed care is likely to result in a significant reduction in public moneys spent on health care.

In Louisiana, as in other regions of the country, there’s a transparently ideological rather than fiscal reason for privatization. Nola.com columnist John Maginnis reports that Jindal has long aimed for this model, calling for it as early as 1996 when he was health-care secretary. And it should be noted that this comes as the latest part of a greater pattern of Jindal's support of privatization. In June this year, a Jindal-backed move to privatize the Louisiana state employees' insurance was shelved amid claims of a suppressed report indicating the privatization would in fact run at a loss. For Medicaid, as with other privatization contracts, there’s good reason to be suspicious of the governor's numbers.


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Wednesday, Jun 22, 2011 02:01 PM EDT
How our two-tiered healthcare system hurts kids

A new study shows that children with public insurance have a lot more trouble getting the care they need

By David Sirota  SALON.com At a legislative level, the political crusade to reduce government “to the size where they can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub” is brilliantly self-sustaining. Both Republicans and conservative Democrats hold up the evils of “Big Government” (read: the non-military/security parts of government) as the rationale to reduce resources for popular programs and when those underfunded programs subsequently underperform, they cite the failure as reason to further demonize government, thus beginning the whole cycle anew.

This now-standard and now-bipartisan Neoliberal Formula is sophistry masquerading as tautology — and it has profound real world effects. The latest example of that truth comes from a new University of Pennsylvania report that exemplifies how the formula has helped embed an insipid “Separate and Unequal” doctrine within America’s healthcare system.

Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Penn study had researchers pose as parents calling physician specialists in Cook County, Ill. The only variable in the calls was insurance status — some callers said they had public insurance, others said they had private insurance. Here’s what they found:

Sixty-six percent of publicly-insured children were unable to get a doctor’s appointment for medical conditions requiring outpatient specialty care including diabetes and seizures, while children with identical symptoms and private insurance were turned away only 11 percent of the time… The study also found that [publicly]-insured children who received an appointment faced longer wait times to be seen.

These numbers are particularly striking, said the Penn researchers, “given the association between socioeconomic disadvantage and poor health status” — an association which means kids covered by public insurance have a disproportionately greater need for specialty care than their privately insured counterparts.

The connection between the Neoliberal Formula and kids being discriminated against on the basis of insurance type is rooted in reimbursement rates paid to physicians.

As both parties have used anti-government arguments to slash taxes, public revenues have predictably dried up. With states under statutory obligation to balance their perpetually strapped budgets, Medicaid reimbursement rates have been regularly put on the chopping block in legislatures, creating ever-widening disparities between what physicians are paid by private insurance and what they are paid by public insurance. (For instance, in Illinois, where the study was conducted, researchers found “an office consultation visit for a problem of moderate severity is reimbursed at $99.86 by Medicaid-CHIP, whereas the average reimbursement for the same code by a commercial preferred-provider organization is approximately $160.”) Considering the ugly economics, it’s no surprise physicians are less eager to accept public insurance patients.

Hence, the Separate and Unequal disparities — disparities that will likely be cited by Republicans in Washington as proof that public insurance programs are inherently bad and therefore need to be even further defunded. Indeed, the infamous Ryan Budget proposes big cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program that would likely result in further reductions in reimbursement rates.

And so the cycle, the disparities and the Neoliberal Formula continue in perpetuity. As I said, it’s a brilliantly self-sustaining ideology, proving that in the era of paradox politics, self-sustaining and self-destructive often go hand in hand.

David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and the best-selling author of the books "Hostile Takeover," "The Uprising" and "Back to Our Future." E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota.






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This is a very good explanation of the Social Security Trust.......it also affects the Medicare payroll tax contributions as well.

How Your Social Security Money Was Stolen – Where Did the $2.5 Trillion Surplus Go?

July 19th, 2011 |

Introduction by David DeGraw, Reports by Dr. Allen Smith

How Republicans, Democrats and the Mega-Wealthy Stole Your Social Security Money

As I’ve been reporting for quite some time now, trillions of our tax dollars have been looted by Wall Street, wars, global corporations and the richest one-tenth of one percent of the population. The economic crisis has made this blatant fact much more evident to the average person. Now that these elaborate schemes are coming undone and major cuts to vital social programs are beginning to be implemented, the American public is going to get a harsh wake up call.

With cuts to Social Security on the way, and Obama’s recent comments saying that he cannot guarantee that Social Security checks will go out if the debt ceiling doesn’t get raised, it’s time to take a closer look at why politicians are pushing to cut this vital program.

The Social Security Trust Fund should currently have $2.5 trillion in surplus. So how is it that these checks could stop being issued if the debt ceiling isn’t raised? Economics professor Dr. Allen Smith, author of The Looting of Social Security: How The Government is Draining America’s Retirement Account, has been reporting on the theft of Social Security funds for years. As he sums it up:

“The government’s $2.5 trillion debt to Social Security is the real reason that so many politicians want to cut benefits. They are trying to find a way to avoid having to repay the looted money…. Given the fact that much of the surplus revenue from the 1983 payroll tax hike ended up in the pockets of the super rich in the form of income tax cuts, I propose a special tax on this group of taxpayers to recoup the missing Social Security money. The government used revenue from the Social Security payroll tax hike to fund tax cuts for the rich because that was where the money was. I think the government should recover the ‘embezzled’ money by taxing the rich.”

Here are reports by Dr. Allen Smith that we have featured over the past two years:

I: It’s Time to Tap the Empty Social Security Trust Fund
II: The Social Security Fraud Has Finally Been Exposed
III: How Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan Pulled off one of the Greatest Frauds Ever Perpetrated against the American People
IV: Obama and the Social Security Time Bomb
V: Censored Social Security Book Back in Print

I: It’s Time to Tap the Empty Social Security Trust Fund

AP writer, Stephen Ohlemacher, sent shock waves throughout the nation this week with his story, “Social Security to start cashing Uncle Sam’s IOUs.”  Social Security has been running large surpluses ever since the enactment of the 1983 payroll tax hike, and was projected to continue running surpluses until at least 2016.  Instead, Ohlemacher reports that the cost of Social Security benefits will exceed payroll tax revenue by approximately $29 billion this year, because of the severe recession which has reduced payroll tax revenue at the very time that many unemployed Americans have been forced to retire early.  

What it all boils down to is that, in order to pay full benefits this year, Social Security will have to come up with an extra $29 billion to supplement the inadequate payroll tax revenue.  Where will that money come from?  It will have to come from increased taxes or from borrowed money.  “Wait a minute!” some readers will say.  Hasn’t Social Security been receiving surplus revenue ever since the 1983 payroll tax hike?  Isn’t there supposed to be approximately $2.5 trillion in the Social Security trust fund?  The answer to both questions is yes.  But there is a problem.  Every dollar of that surplus Social Security revenue has already been spent by the government.  Much of it went to fund wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The rest has been spent on other government programs.

The American people were not supposed to find out about the great Social Security scam for another six years, and the government was hoping to continue to receive surplus money from the Social Security contributions of working Americans for at least that long.  But the inevitable day of reckoning has come, six years sooner than anybody expected, because of the severe recession.  And the government of the United States has been caught with its hand still in the empty Social Security cookie jar.

For more than a decade, I have been trying to expose the Social Security scam just like Harry Markopolos  was trying to expose the Bernie Madoff scam.  But nobody would listen.  If anyone deserves credit for helping the government to keep its dirty secret for so long, that honor should go to the AARP and the NCPSSM.  I have been members of both organizations for years and I have tried very hard to get their cooperation in exposing the fraud.  But they have refused to have anything to do with me.  Instead, they have continued to bombard their members and the public with misinformation.  They have argued that the trust fund is full of “good-as-gold” U.S. Treasury Bonds that could be used to pay full Social Security benefits until at least 2037 without any changes.  In reaction to Olemacher’s AP story, Barbara Kennelly, president of the NCPSSM, responded with the following words, “Good luck to the politician who reneges on that debt.  Those bonds are protected by the full faith and credit of the United States of America.  They’re as solid as what we owe China and Japan.”

I believe Barbara Kennelly to be among the strongest and most honorable defenders of Social Security.  I think she truly wants to save Social Security, as we now know it, which is the same goal that has motivated me to make so much effort for more than a decade.  I have tried to convince Ms. Kennelly that I was trying to save Social Security by exposing the truth about the trust fund, but she wouldn’t even consider the possibility that the government has been looting the trust fund all these years.  I requested the opportunity to discuss this issue with her, either in a face-to-face meeting, or through telephone conversations, in the hope that we could work together toward a common goal.  She ignored my requests and refused to communicate with me in any way. 

It has been clear for quite some time that the trust fund contained no real assets.  David Walker, Comptroller General of the GAO, stated on January 21, 2005, “There are no stocks or bonds or real estate in the trust fund.  It has nothing of real value to draw down.”  On April 5, 2005, President George W. Bush finally acknowledged the empty trust fund by saying, “There is no trust fund, just IOUs that I saw firsthand that future generations will pay—will pay for either in higher taxes, or reduced benefits, or cuts to other critical government programs.” 

If there was any doubt remaining, with regard to whether or not the trust fund contains any real assets, that doubt should have been removed by the following words in the 2009 Social Security Trustees Report:

Neither the redemption of trust fund bonds, nor interest paid on those bonds, provides any new net income to the Treasury, which must finance redemptions and interest payments through some combination of increased taxation, reductions in other government spending, or additional borrowing from the public.

There is nothing ambiguous about the above words.  They make it clear that the government does not receive any cash income from the alleged interest payments on the trust fund IOUs.  The interest payments are made in the form of additional worthless IOUs.  The government cannot sell the IOUs because they are not marketable and have no cash value.  The IOUs simply represent a debt of one branch of the government (the Treasury Department) to another branch of government (Social Security).  They cancel each other out. 

The Social Security surplus revenue should have been saved and invested in public-issue, marketable Treasury bonds.  These bonds are “good as gold” and default-proof.  They are the kind of U.S. Treasury bonds that are owned by China and Japan, Bill Gates, pension funds, and every other serious investor that owns Treasuries.  If the Social Security surplus had been invested in public-issue marketable Treasury bonds, as it could have been, and should have been, Barbara Kennelly would be correct in saying that the Social Security holdings are “as solid as what we owe China and Japan.”  Unfortunately not a single dollar of the surplus Social Security revenue was saved or invested in anything.  It was all spent, and, once money is spent, there is nothing left to invest. 

The government cannot, and will not, ever default on any of its public issue, marketable Treasury bonds because of the panic it would create in world markets and the damage it would do to the nation’s worldwide credibility.  But Congress has the legal authority to default on its debt to Social Security, and, if it should do so, the outside world would probably view it primarily as an internal matter between the United States Government and its citizens. One of the least known facts about Social Security is that, although the government does have a moral obligation to pay Social Security benefits to those who have earned them, the government does not have a legal obligation to do so.  

In a 1960 ruling by the United States Supreme Court, the court ruled that nobody has a “contractual earned right“ to Social Security benefits.  Section 1104 of the 1935 Social Security Act specifically states, “The right to alter, amend, or repeal any provision of this Act is hereby reserved to the Congress.”  According to the above strong language, Congress could do whatever it wanted to do with regard to changing or even eliminating Social Security. 

Early on, some did not take the language seriously because they thought it was probably unconstitutional.  However, in 1960, in the case of Fleming v. Nestor, the Supreme Court upheld the denial of benefits to Nestor, even though he had contributed to the program for 19 years and was already receiving benefits   In its ruling, the Supreme Court established the principle that entitlement to Social Security benefits “is not a contractual right.”    As a result of the 1960 Supreme Court ruling, the future of Social Security is totally in the hands of Congress and the President.  They have the legal authority to amend any and all parts of the Social Security Act, as well as the authority to either increase or decrease Social Security benefits.

II: The Social Security Fraud Has Finally Been Exposed

On December 13, 2010, the highly respected Kansas City Star, winner of eight Pulitzer Prizes, published an editorial entitled, “The myth of the Social Security trust fund,” which included the following statement:

A lot of people speak of those IOUs as if they can be pulled out and exchanged for money to pay benefit checks.  They can’t. As the Clinton administration budget of 2000 explained, the securities in the Trust Fund ‘do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund  benefits.  Those special-issue bonds can only be redeemed by raising taxes, cutting spending elsewhere, or borrowing — exactly what the government would have to do if the Trust Fund didn’t exist.  The Trust Fund, said the Clinton budget message, ‘does not, by itself, have any impact on the Government’s ability to pay benefits.

On December 20, distinguished business columnist, Allan Sloan, seven-time winner of the prestigious Loeb award, business journalism’s highest honor, called the trust fund “a mirage” in his Washington Post column.  In the column, titled, “New tax law reveals the mirage of the Social Security trust fund,” Sloan wrote:

My problem with the trust fund is that it’s a snare and a delusion for people who think that it makes Social Security financially sound.  It doesn’t do that, because having government IOUs in a government trust fund doesn’t make it any easier for the government to cover Social Security’s cash shortfalls than it would be if there were no trust fund.

These are not new revelations.  I have spent the past decade relentlessly trying to expose the Social Security fraud, and prominent government officials were screaming out the warnings two decades ago.

On October 13, 1989, Senator Ernest Hollings of SC stood on the Senate floor and  warned, “…the most reprehensible fraud in this great jambalaya of frauds is the systematic and total ransacking of  the Social Security trust fund…in the next century…the American people will wake up to the reality that those IOUs in the trust fund vault are a 21st century version of Confederate bank notes.”

The Kansas City Star editorial and Allan Sloan’s Washington Post column seem to have stunned the AARP and the NCPSSM into silence.  These organization have repeatedly claimed that the Social Security surplus is invested in U.S. Treasury bonds just like those held by the Chinese government.  They have battled my efforts to get this same message out for a decade, but they seem to have had the wind knocked out of them by the Star and Allan Sloan.  So far, they have made no attempt to rebut either of the two articles.  The AARP and the NCPSSM have been claiming for years that the trust fund holds enough assets to pay full Social Security benefits until at least 2037, when, in fact, in the words of the Kansas City Star, it has no “real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits.”

The Kansas City Star and Allan Sloan have exposed the trust fund myth so clearly that I think the national debate will now turn to how and why the United States government violated both the public trust and federal law for a quarter-century in a way that caused a major transfer of income from the lower and middle class to the richest of all Americans.  By imposing a hefty increase in the regressive payroll tax in 1983, and then using a large portion of the new revenue to offset the lost revenue resulting from the unaffordable income tax cuts that went primarily to the richest Americans, the United States government engineered a major transfer of income from the lower and middle classes to the richest of all Americans.

So where does that leave Social Security?  The approximately $2.5 trillion in surplus revenue, generated by the 1983 payroll tax hike, rightly belongs to the Social Security trust fund and to American workers who paid the extra taxes.  But the money is all gone — “borrowed” or “stolen” by the federal government and spent for general government operations.  None of the money was saved or invested in anything, so the trust fund contains no real economic assets with which to supplement the payroll tax which will become inadequate to pay full benefits after 2015.

I believe it is time for the public to demand, in a very strong way, that the government make arrangements to repay its debt to Social Security.  It is futile for the AARP and the NCPSSM to continue to insist that Social Security is in fine shape and has enough assets to pay full benefits until 2037.  This just isn’t true.  What the organizations need to do now is put political pressure on the government to move quickly to enact legislation that would require the repayment of the looted money, as it is needed, over the next 27 years.  There is no way that the government could possibly come up with the $2.5 trillion in the near future, given the budget crisis.  But it can make a legal commitment to repay the money in installments.  Will that happen?  Not without major political pressure from the majority of Americans. The AARP and the NCPSSM have frittered away the past ten years when the problem could have been resolved. If the looting could have been stopped when I first began actively urging such action in 2000, the trust fund would today hold approximately $1.5 trillion (the amount looted during the past 10 years) in “good-as-gold” real assets.  Instead, it holds no real economic assets.

The reason I don’t believe the government will honor its debt to Social Security without major political pressure is that it does not legally have to repay the money.  The government certainly has a moral obligation to do so, but, because of a 1960 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, it has an out.  In the case of Fleming v. Nestor, the Court ruled that nobody has a “contractual earned right” to Social Security benefits.  This ruling was based on Section 1104 of the 1935 Social Security Act which specifically states, “The right to alter, amend, or repeal any provision of this ACT is hereby reserved to the Congress.” Based on this strong language, Congress could do whatever it wanted to do with regard to changing or even eliminating Social Security.

Many people argue that the government could not default on its debt to Social Security because of the effect such action would have on financial markets and the nation’s public image.  If the government held the same kind of real bonds that are traded on world markets, this would be true.  Public-issue, marketable U.S. Treasury bonds are default-proof, and that is the kind of bonds that the Social Security surplus revenue was supposed to be invested in.  If this had been done, Social Security would be in fine shape today.  But, instead of using the surplus Social Security revenue to buy such bonds in the open market, the government chose to spend the money and issue IOUs to replace the spent money.  These IOUs are non-marketable and could not be sold to anyone, even for a penny on the dollar.  The government has the legal authority to declare these IOUs null and void.  Since these IOUs are not traded, such action would have little effect on financial markets, and foreign governments would probably consider such action as an internal matter between the American government and its citizens.

The Social Security trust fund does not hold any real economic assets that can be drawn down to pay future benefits.  That is an indisputable fact today, and it has been true ever since the 1983 payroll tax hike was enacted.  Every dollar of the $2.5 trillion in surplus revenue, generated by the payroll tax hike, has been spent on programs unrelated to Social Security, leaving nothing to save or invest.

A few United States Senators tried to sound the alarm two decades ago, and I have dedicated the past ten years of my life to trying to alert the public to the awful truth about the Social Security trust fund.  For more than a quarter of a century, the United States government, under five presidents, has hoodwinked the American public into believing their Social Security contributions would be used for future Social Security benefits when, in fact, all of the surplus Social Security revenue was used to fund such things as tax cuts for the rich, two wars, and other government programs.

Today, thanks to the efforts of the editorial board of the Kansas City Star, and thanks to the courage and competence of Allan Sloan and a few other journalists, the big bad secret is finally out, and I think it is too late to get this cat back in the bag.

III: How Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan Pulled off one of the Greatest Frauds Ever Perpetrated against the American People

Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan pulled off one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated against the American people in the history of this great nation, and the underlying scam is still alive and well, more than a quarter century later. It represents the very foundation upon which the economic malpractice that led the nation to the great economic collapse of 2008 was built. Ronald Reagan was a cunning politician, but he didn’t know much about economics. Alan Greenspan was an economist, who had no reluctance to work with a politician on a plan that would further the cause of the right-wing goals that both he and President Reagan shared….

Exactly what Reagan did, with the help of Alan Greenspan. Consider the following sequence of events:

1) President Reagan appointed Greenspan as chairman of the 1982 National Commission on Social Security Reform (aka The Greenspan Commission)

2) The Greenspan Commission recommended a major payroll tax hike to generate Social Security surpluses for the next 30 years, in order to build up a large reserve in the trust fund that could be drawn down during the years after Social Security began running deficits.

3) The 1983 Social Security amendments enacted hefty increases in the payroll tax in order to generate large future surpluses.

4) As soon as the first surpluses began to role in, in 1985, the money was put into the general revenue fund and spent on other government programs. None of the surplus was saved or invested in anything. The surplus Social Security revenue, that was paid by working Americans, was used to replace the lost revenue from Reagan’s big income tax cuts that went primarily to the rich.

5) In 1987, President Reagan nominated Greenspan as the successor to Paul Volker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Greenspan continued as Fed Chairman until January 31, 2006. (One can only speculate on whether the coveted Fed Chairmanship represented, at least in part, a payback for Greenspan’s role in initiating the Social Security surplus revenue.)

6) In 1990, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, a member of the Greenspan Commission, and one of the strongest advocates the the 1983 legislation, became outraged when he learned that first Reagan, and then President George H.W. Bush used the surplus Social Security revenue to pay for other government programs instead of saving and investing it for the baby boomers. Moynihan locked horns with President Bush and proposed repealing the 1983 payroll tax hike. Moynihan’s view was that if the government could not keep its hands out of the Social Security cookie jar, the cookie jar should be emptied, so there would be no surplus Social Security revenue for the government to loot. President Bush would have no part of repealing the payroll tax hike. The “read-my-lips-no-new-taxes” president was not about to give up his huge slush fund.

IV: Obama and the Social Security Time Bomb

The 1983 Social Security “fix” required the baby boomers to pay much higher payroll taxes so that they would prepay most of the cost of their own benefits. The higher taxes would generate Social Security surpluses for approximately 30 years, which were supposed to be saved and invested to build up a large reserve in the trust fund. Then, when the baby boomers began to retire in about 2010, the accumulated surpluses from the previous three decades would gradually be drawn down and used to supplement the payroll tax revenue, which was expected to become inadequate to pay full benefits by about 2015. The 1983 Social Security legislation laid the foundation for the greatest fraud ever perpetrated against the American people by their government. The $2.54 trillion in surplus Social Security revenue, generated by the 1983 payroll tax hike, has all been “borrowed” or “stolen” by the government and used to fund tax cuts for the rich, wars, and other government programs.

President Obama is the fifth president to participate in the great Social Security scam, but he has the dubious distinction of being the president, on whose watch, the Social Security time bomb, activated 25 years ago by President Reagan, will run out of time. All of the previous administrations knew that spending Social Security revenue, as if it were general revenue, was wrong and was a violation of both federal law and the public trust. But, they all had the luxury of knowing that the raided Social Security money would not be needed to pay benefits while they were still in office. However, President Obama learned early in his presidency that, unless the government ended the raiding and began repaying the money that had already been raided, Social Security would face a major financial crisis during his presidency.

Beginning in 2015, and every year after that, payroll tax revenue will be insufficient to pay full benefits. This was known in 1983 when the Social Security “fix” was enacted. The plan was to draw down the large reserve that is supposed to be in the trust fund and use that money to supplement payroll tax revenue so that full benefits could be paid until 2037. But that money has already been spent, so the government will have to come up with the money again to repay the $2.54 trillion that it embezzled. This might be manageable in the early years, when the difference between benefit costs and payroll tax revenue is minimal. But, each year, the amount of money needed to replace the looted money gets bigger and bigger. For example, Social Security will run a deficit of approximately $41.4 billion in 2010. But in 2020, the Social Security deficit will have grown to $101.4 billion. Five years later, in 2025, the Social Security shortfall will be $274.6 billion. In 2035, the government would have to come up with an astronomical $621.9 billion in order to pay full Social Security benefits.

When President Obama first saw these numbers, he must have almost gone into a state of shock. His predecessors left him with a lot of problems that can plainly be seen by the public—two wars, a collapsed economy, and a gigantic deficit and debt. But the embezzlement of the Social Security trust fund money was done without public knowledge, and it is doubtful that Obama knew anything about it prior to becoming a United States Senator, and he may have not known about it until he entered the White House. President Obama cannot just kick the can farther down the road as his four predecessors have done. He must find a way to raise the money to repay the government’s debt to Social Security, or cut Social Security benefits so the money will not have to be repaid.

Embezzlement is a crime, and every participant (all the presidents and members of Congress who supported the practice) knew they were committing a crime against the American people as they used the people’s Social Security money as general revenue over the past 25 years. Some individuals, such as the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, attempted to end the raiding 20 years ago. On September 27, 2000, I launched my decade-long campaign to expose the Social Security scam with an appearance on CNN News to discuss my then newly-published book, The Alleged Budget Surplus, Social Security, and Voodoo Economics. For the past 10 years, I have been warning, as forcefully as I could, that a day of reckoning would come, at which time the government might consider defaulting on its huge Social Security debt. But nobody wanted to listen. That day of reckoning is now upon us.

V: Censored Social Security Book Back in Print

When my book, The Looting of Social Security: How The Government is Draining America’s Retirement Account, was published by a New York publisher in 2004, I thought my long battle to expose the truth about the Social Security trust fund was almost won.  But that book met with foul play, and was removed from the market before many people had the opportunity to read it.

Early reviews revealed just how provocative the book was going to be.  The Boston Globe reported,  “… With dismal clarity, Smith lays out the step-by-step history of how a national pension plan was transformed into an outright shakedown of working people” and ALA Booklist said, “Smith has written a scathing account of massive fraud on the part of our nation’s leaders, who have plundered every cent of the Social Security Trust Fund surplus that was specifically earmarked for the retirement of the baby boomers.”

On February 26, 2004, I appeared on CNBC, to respond to Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan, who had called for Social Security benefit cuts the previous day.  I held my book in front of the camera and said, as forcefully as I could, “Alan Greenspan should be ashamed of himself for what he is not telling the American people.” I now believe that this public criticism of the Fed chairman may have been the final nail in the coffin of The Looting of Social Security, which was very critical of Greenspan’s role in making the looting of the trust fund possible.

A few weeks after my controversial appearance on CNBC, the book mysteriously disappeared from bookstores, nationwide, and was listed as “unavailable” by Amazon.com.  I tried to get the rights to the book reverted back to me so I could publish my message elsewhere, but my publisher refused to surrender the rights.  Thus the book was effectively killed off, and there was nothing I could do about it.  I was unable to pinpoint exactly who was responsible for rendering the book “unavailable,” but a lot of people did not want the contents of the book to become public.  Certainly, people in government, such as Alan Greenspan and Karl Rove, as well as many others in the Bush administration, would have wanted to prevent the book from becoming public knowledge, if they could find a way to do so.

Although the public knew nothing about it at the time, Greenspan’s February 25, 2004 call for Social Security benefit cuts was the opening salvo in an organized campaign to dismantle Social Security, as we now know it, once George W. Bush was safely elected to a second term. On August 27, 2004, Greenspan again spoke of cutting Social Security benefits during remarks at a symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

“As a nation, we owe it to our retirees to promise only the benefits that can be delivered,” Greenspan said.  “If we have promised more than our economy has the power to deliver to retirees without unduly diminishing real income gains of workers, as I fear we may have, we must recalibrate our public programs so that pending retirees have time to adjust through other channels.”

Almost immediately upon his re-election, President George W. Bush made public his plan to partially privatize Social Security.  On November 4, 2004, Bush said, “Let me put it this way: I earned capital, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.  It is my style…I’ve earned capital in this election— and I’m going to spend it for what I told the people I’d spend it on, which is — you’ve heard the agenda:  Social Security and tax reform, moving this economy forward, education, fighting and winning the war on terror.”

Like other Americans, there is no way I could have known about the standby plan to privatize Social Security, which was already formulated at the time I appeared on CNBC and publicly challenged Alan Greenspan on Social Security.  Therefore, I didn’t realize just how big the potential impact of widespread readership of my book could be on the future plans of the Bush administration.  From the administration’s point of view, I’m sure that they were not going to allow my book, or a book by any other author, to sabotage their plan to privatize Social Security.  The book was a threat, and the threat had to be dealt with.

What is far more puzzling to me, than the opposition to my book in 2004, is the current effort to discredit me, and the book.  I was almost flabbergasted when I learned, just a few weeks ago, that a website that goes by the name of “Medicare and Medicare Programs” launched a smear campaign on September 22, 2010 against me and the book that has been off the market since 2004.  You don’t believe me?  Click on the following link and it will take you to that website.  I tried to find out who owns this website and who is behind this effort, but I was unable to do so.  Who is sponsoring this website, and what is their agenda?  These things don’t just happen by chance. The five negative reviews, alleged by the website to have been submitted on September 22, 2010, are exact duplicates of “customer reviews” from Amazon.com that were posted in 2004 and 2005.

If the intent of this internet campaign was to stomp out the message of my book, now and forever, their actions have backfired on them.  It was in reaction to this campaign that I decided not to allow them to kick a dead book without bringing the book back to life.  When I finally regained the rights to “The Looting of Social Security” in 2008, I vowed to re-publish the book, when the time was right, under an arrangement that would guarantee that the book remained in print for as long as anyone wanted to read it.

The smear campaign on the internet has convinced me that the time is now right for the book to be resurrected.  Therefore, I am pleased to announce that the book has just been published by Ironwood Publications, under the title, The Looting of Social Security, New release of the book they didn’t want you to read.  The new book includes all of the content of the original book, along with a new forward written by Dr. Victor Stoltzfus, President Emeritus, Goshen College, and an afterword written by me that brings the book up to date.  The book was officially released yesterday, November 1, 2010.

For an extensive archive of Dr. Allen Smith’s work, visit Dissident Voice.

- See more at: http://ampedstatus.org/how-your-social-security-money-was-stolen-where-did-the-2-5-trillion-surplus-go/#sthash.vcYDChcV.dpuf





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This is a Laugh Out Loud look at the retirement shortfall and how it involves nothing but corporate fraud of individuals and government coffers.  Tens of trillions of dollar stolen through fraud over just a few decades is the shortfall in retirement and we only need to reinstate Rule of Law to get it back to the people needing it in the near future.  Remember, all of the national debt of $16 trillion would be paid by simple recovery of corporate fraud!  Politicians not making sure that happens are aiding and abetting and NEED TO GO!!!!

RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!!

Retirement Shortfall May Top $14 Trillion
By Philip Moeller

June 20, 2013

One way or another, the federal government, and ultimately U.S. taxpayers, will foot an enormous retirement bill. According to a new study, "The Retirement Savings Crisis: Is It Worse Than We Think?" the nation is dangerously unprepared for retirement. The financial shortfall threatens to be so great, in fact, that we either need to beef up Social Security and other public and private retirement programs, or get ready for an enormous surge in demand for Medicaid and other government safety-net programs.

The research was released Thursday by the National Institute on Retirement Security, a nonpartisan Washington D.C., nonprofit with heavy representation among state employee groups. NIRS joins a growing list of think tanks that say the nation's retirement outlook has been devastated by the decline of traditional defined-benefit pensions, low private savings and the inadequate availability and employee participation in 401(k) plans and similar defined-contribution programs. The steep recession and slow recovery have further deepened our retirement hole.

"The average working household has virtually no retirement savings," the report says. Its findings, and those of many similar studies, rely heavily on the Federal Reserve Board's 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances.

"When all households are included – not just households with retirement accounts – the median retirement account balance is $3,000 for all working-age households and $12,000 for near-retirement households," the NIRS study says. Looking only at households made up of people ages 55 to 64 – whose members are nearing retirement – the study says less than 5 percent had retirement account balances that were on target to meet broadly accepted retirement savings targets.

(Two common yardsticks for measuring retirement adequacy are in broad use. One defines adequacy as being able to generate incomes in retirement that are 75 to 85 percent of working-age incomes. The second looks at retirement savings as a multiple of pre-retirement annual incomes. Fidelity Investments has recommended, for example, that people have nest eggs at the age of 65 that equal eight years of their annual incomes prior to retirement.)

"What actually surprised me the most was that $3,000 figure," says Nari Rhee, author of the report and NIRS manager of research. "I didn't expect that figure to be so low." While financial markets have made huge gains since the 2010 Federal Reserve data, Rhee says the negative state of Americans' retirement has not changed much. "It's a really, really, really deep hole," she says, "and people have been so deep in this hole that you could throw trillions and trillions of dollars in, and it would barely make a dent."

"The median balance of $100,000 for those nearing retirement will only provide a few hundred dollars per month in income if the full account balance is annuitized," the report says. "Among working households age 55-64, nearly 32 percent have no retirement savings, and another 32 percent have retirement savings less than 100 percent of their income."

"Most people do not have a clear idea of how much they need to save to have enough income,'" it added. "For instance, a $200,000 retirement account balance may seem high, but is less than half of the minimum amount that a couple with $60,000 in combined annual income will need."

Looking at the collective retirement shortfall of all working Americans, NIRS generated four estimates of the gap pegged to different measures of financial worth:

1. $14 trillion measured only by retirement account balances.

2. $11.6 trillion measured by total retirement assets once defined-benefit pensions are included.

3. $11.1 trillion measured by total financial assets that include holdings outside of retirement accounts.

4. $6.8 trillion using the broad net worth measure, which includes homes and other non-financial assets.

"Clearly, more households need to increase their retirement contributions, to the extent that they are able to do so," the study concludes. "Even so, the magnitude of the retirement savings gap is such that most people will have to work longer if they are able to stay employed, or experience a significant decline in their standard of living when they retire."

One of the conclusions NIRS reached is that current debates about cutting Social Security benefits are misguided. The program should, if anything, be strengthened to reflect the lack of resources in other consumer retirement accounts.

NIRS Executive Director Diane Oakley told U.S. News that opinion research done earlier by the group found a disconnect between the severity of the retirement challenge as seen by Americans and by their elected leaders in Washington. "People want Washington to help them, but there is strong sentiment that Washington just doesn't understand," she says.

Oakley says one possible way of "getting through" to government leaders might be to compare the rising federal debt – now approaching $17 trillion – with the equally enormous retirement deficits facing the nation. "No one has started to look at this [retirement] debt as something that we are going to have to repay ourselves," she says. "Maybe this $11 trillion [the midpoint of the study's retirement shortfall] will help everyone understand that we need to do something."



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These finances are improving because of the almost $1 trillion in cuts to Medicare that have many seniors unable to access care......the problem with entitlements is that 1/2 of entitlement spending has been stolen through corporate fraud these few decades.  Also, since Reagan's time, payroll taxes have been sent to Treasury and not the Trusts leaving these Trusts raided of $3-4 trillion.  WE NEED THAT MONEY BACK AND NOT CUTS TO CARE!


Report: Medicare’s finances improve, Social Security holding steady

• Posted on Friday, May 31, 2013

By Tony Pugh | McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Medicare’s troubled finances got a boost Friday when the annual trustees report showed that the program’s hospital insurance trust fund will remain solvent until 2026, two years longer than was projected last year.

Social Security has enough cash to cover benefits until 2033, which is unchanged from last year’s projection.

The Obama administration credited Medicare’s improved outlook to lower spending for hospital and skilled nursing care and lower projected program costs for Medicare Advantage plans, the private plans that provide Medicare benefits.

Certain provisions of the controversial health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also were credited with improving the fiscal outlook of Medicare, the national health insurance program for older people and those with disabilities.

The new law instituted a number of money-saving initiatives, such as cutting payments to hospitals that have high readmission rates for Medicare patients. From 2011 to 2012, 70,000 fewer Medicare beneficiaries were readmitted because of complications from previous ailments.

At an average cost of $10,000 per readmission, the decline potentially saved the program an estimated $700 million, said Brian Cook, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services.

“The Medicare report demonstrates, once again, the importance of the Affordable Care Act, which has strengthened Medicare’s finances by reining in health care costs,” Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said in a statement. “The health care law has also helped extend the life of the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund.”

But the modest improvement in finances was no cause for celebration. The trustees report made it clear that Medicare still faces a rocky financial future.

“The financial projections in this report indicate a need for additional steps to address Medicare’s remaining financial challenges,” the report said. “Consideration of further reforms should occur in the near future. The sooner solutions are enacted, the more flexible and gradual they can be.”

The warnings reflect the coming wave of more than 70 million aging baby boomers, born from 1946 to 1964. They’ll push the number of Medicare recipients 65 and older from 43.1 million in 2012 to 92 million in 2060, federal estimates show.

About half the nation’s seniors already have multiple chronic health conditions, which will make their health care and that of future Medicare recipients more costly going forward. This larger, sicker population is projected to hike Medicare spending from $557 billion this year to more than $1 trillion in 2023, according to recent estimates by the Congressional Budget Office.

That dynamic is likely to fuel continued calls to cut the program’s spending.

President Barack Obama wants to cut Medicare spending by changing the program’s payment structures, reducing subsidies to drug companies and charging affluent seniors more for their care. Republicans in the House of Representatives support turning Medicare into a voucher program that provides a fixed amount of money, which seniors would use to pay for health care.

Nancy LeaMond, an executive vice president at AARP, the leading advocacy group for seniors, said both proposals could harm seniors.

“Too many people in Washington think the only way to address Medicare’s financial challenges is to cut benefits or ask seniors to pay more,” she said. “But that’s not the answer. We can reduce costs and find significant savings in Medicare and throughout the health care system through responsible solutions rather than harmful cuts.”

Medicare covered more than 50 million people last year, including 42.1 million people 65 and older and 8.5 million people with disabilities.

Social Security’s funding situation isn’t as dire as Medicare’s, but it, too, faces financial challenges. If the program’s trust fund that pays old-age benefits becomes depleted as projected in 2033, only 77 percent of benefits would be payable at that time.

The trust fund that pays disability insurance is slated to become depleted in 2016, the same as last year’s estimate. If that occurs, only 80 percent of disability benefits would be payable at that time.

“Legislative action is needed as soon as possible to address this financial imbalance,” said Carolyn Colvin, the acting Social Security commissioner.

Obama has offered smaller, inflation-based benefit hikes for Social Security recipients, but congressional Democrats have been lukewarm to the proposal and Republicans have called for deeper cuts.

Max Richtman, the president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, stressed that Social Security has a $2.7 trillion surplus that continues to grow.

“This annual trustees report is little more than an opportunity to reissue the same doom-and-gloom news releases and renewed calls to cut these programs in order to ‘save’ them,” Richtman said in a statement.

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Vision for Social Security

Is our country losing the vision and values that gave rise to Social Security?

Social Security benefits lag far behind those of other developed countries. A new analysis of census data shows that elder poverty is much higher than we first realized. And yet the discussion in Washington is of cutting, not expanding, it. The number of impoverished seniors would rise sharply if that happened, or if the Medicare cuts currently under discussion became law.

The numbers say that Social Security should be increased, not cut, and most Americans agree.

But the Social Security cutters, financed by billions and aided by their network of powerful friends in government and the media, are appealing to the human heart. That’s a bitter irony for a policy prescription that even their own consciences must recognize is heartless.

We ♥ Social Security

Social Security, one of the most popular and reliable programs in the United States, is under concerted attack from corporate and Wall Street interests. Both the Republicans and President Obama have proposed to cut it.

The case against this ill-advised move has been made again and again. Polls, charts, graphs and logic have been deployed in support of a simple message: Social Security must be expanded, not reduced.

So why – why, in the name of all that’s good and decent – aren’t we expanding Social Security? Why does the President’s proposed budget still include the “chained CPI,” which would raise taxes on the drowning middle class while cutting Social Security benefits?

There have been several proposals to expand Social Security. These proposals would also make it fiscally impregnable for the foreseeable future, as far as the actuarial eye can see. Why have they received so little press attention and political support?

Maybe it’s a matter of heart, of soul, of vision. The Social Security Cutters are putting all they’ve got – personal and emotional, as well as financial – the fight against Social Security. They’ve created a narrative which is false, but is simple and internally coherent. Their vision can be summed up with these words: We can’t afford it.

That’s not true. It’s time for a better vision, one which is more fiscally sound – and truer to our values as a society.

Motive and Opportunity

The Social Security Cutters are funded by hedge fund billionaires, major Wall Street bankers, and defense contractor CEOs. Their spokespeople include a handful of economists whose views get disproportionate attention, thanks to the money behind them, along with a hefty chunk of Democratic “centrists” whose policy prescriptions on Social Security are to the right of most Republicans.

The funders’ motives are clear: Cutting Social Security would lead to more funds under Wall Street’s management.  It would also lead to less public pressure to tax ultra-wealthy individuals like themselves.

And policymakers who are still driven by macroeconomic misperception could then convince themselves that “government spending” (which Social Security isn’t, at least in the deficit-spending sense)  is no longer “out of control” (it’s not, but they think it is). That means they’d feel free to keep funneling hundreds of billions of dollars of public money to defense contractors every year.

Moral Certitude


As we’ve said, it’s a heartless mission: sacrificing the nation’s elderly and disabled for personal enrichment. And yet they’ve managed to convince politicians, the media – and apparently even themselves – that they’re acting for the greater good. People who know these players intimately insist it’s true: They genuinely believe that their anti-Social Security campaign is a noble venture. That moral self-assurance has undoubtedly helped them recruit so many Democratic leaders. The list of Democratic political supporters begins with Bill Clinton, who is their tireless pitchman; Barack Obama, who has shown dogged determination in putting Social Security cuts on the table; and, most recently, outgoing Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

(Republicans don’t have to be recruited. They’re already waiting in line to support the wealthy and powerful.)

Even Alan Simpson, the Republican senator turned anti-Social Security pit bull, clearly seems to believe that he’s fighting on the side of the angels. Granted, Simpson doesn’t appear to have a firm grasp of the policy specifics. (We’re being kind here.) And he doesn’t overemphasize the civility that one normally learns in the United States Senate. (Here, too.) But ya gotta give him this: Simpson clearly believes the nonsense he’s dishing out.

And while the Cutters prattle about “saving Social Security” – by destroying it, as a general once proposed for a Vietnamese village – poverty is rampant among America’s seniors.

Poor, Old America

The U.S. Census Bureau reevaluated its poverty figures using a “supplemental” analysis which included the cost of health care and other living expenses excluded from earlier studies. It found that 15 percent of people over 65 now live in poverty.

(It should be noted that the Social Security eligibility age is already being gradually raised to 67, which will add incrementally to these numbers with each passing year.) The Kaiser Foundation dug a little deeper into the census data and found that “the share of seniors living in poverty is higher in every state under the supplemental measure than under the official measure, and at least twice as high in 12 states.”

Compare and Contrast

Expanding Social Security isn’t a particularly generous idea. According to a pension database created by the Organization of Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), the U.S. pension system only replaces 42.3 percent of a person’s working income. That’s significantly below the European average of 63.1 percent, or the overall OECD average of 60.8 percent.

Americans want a better Social Security system, like the ones most other developed countries have. It would be good for the economy if we had one. It would also help offset the injustices created by growing wealth inequality in this country.

But to get one we’ll need a vision.

Growth, Jobs, and Values

Our task of reconstruction does not require the creation of new and strange values. It is rather the finding of the way once more to known, but some degree forgotten ideals and values.– Franklin D. Roosevelt

Social Security is based on simple moral principles: children who lose one or both parents shouldn’t be forced to into child labor; disabled people shouldn’t be condemned to poverty; and people should be able to retire with financial security after a full working life. For nearly 75 years it was considered inhumane and a violation of our core social values to suggest taking these economic rights away.

Only one or two decades ago it would have been considered alien to our values to suggest, as so many politicians and pundits do now, that it was more important to coddle wealthy “job creators” than to strive for the best interests of the elderly, disabled, and young.

Back then both parties understood a fundamental economic principle: that material support given to populations like these results in greater spending, economic growth, and more jobs. Social Security can and does, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, “take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.”

A Bright, Shining Web

Our national vision seems to have lost the concept of mutual reliance which spurred growth and made us stronger. We’ve lost the vision of an interconnected web of common interests, a matrix of fellowship and trust spanning generations, ethnicities and income levels.

Sure, there were always those who condemned this web of interdependence and advocated a dog-eat-dog world. But their primitive views, once the exception, now seems more like the rule.

In mythology, “Indra’s Web” was an infinitely large net with a jewel placed at every interersection of its threads. Each jewel reflects all of the others, so that a change to one immediately affects all of the others.

Americans instinctively understand that a healthy society is like that web. We know in our hearts that an injury against any one of us affects us all – and that whenever each of us shines brighter, we all shine brighter.

Beyond the Arithmetic of Selfishness

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before …– William Shakespeare

The Cutters would turn generation against generation by employing a false and selfish arithmetic of what is contributed and what is received, shredding this ancient and beautiful web of mutual support with a vulgar and misapplied mathematics.  But, as Franklin Roosevelt noted:

Security was attained in the early days by the interdependence of members of families upon each other and of families within a small community upon each other. The complexities of great communities and of organized industry make less real these simple means of security … Therefore we are compelled to employ the active interest of the Nation as a whole through government in order to ensure a greater security for each individual who composes it.

Nobody in a traditional family or community ever ran a profit/loss statement on feeding Grandpa, or asked if Grandma had offered as much food to her children as she was eating now in her elder years.

And we still understand a simple truth: That today’s Gen X-er or Millenial is tomorrow’s senior citizen or disabled person.

A Call to Conscience – and Soul

The complexities Roosevelt spoke about are even deeper now. Our families and communities aren’t just separated by geographic distance. Millions of Americans are bound into bank servitude by debt and driven from their communities by foreclosures and job searches.

Social Security benefits are calculated from lifetime earnings. Middle-class Americans have already seen their Social Security benefits reduced already as the result of wage stagnation. Millions of people have seen even greater cuts as the result of  short- or long-term unemployment.

And yet, when we need this bright shining web more then ever, there’s talking of cutting its threads instead. We need to strengthen our web of mutuality – for the sake of Social Security, but more importantly for the sake of our national soul.

When they falsely claim that “we can’t afford to increase Social Security,” give them the right facts and figures. But also tell them that, for the sake of our future and our consciences, for the sake of our national vision, we can’t afford not to.




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Let's be clear......THIS IS A SUPER BAD IDEA. We the people have Social Security and we would have personal pensions for many if they hadn't been stolen or are actively being dismantled!!!! The last thing we want is to put more worker's money in this market! This plan has been advanced by Obama's budget and it is meant only as a stepping stone to privatizing Social Security!!!!


Fink Says U.S. Workers Need Mandatory Retirement Savings

By Alexis Leondis & Margaret Collins - May 7, 2013 1:13 PM ET

BlackRock Inc.’s (BLK) Laurence D. Fink, head of the world’s largest asset manager, said U.S. employers should be required to put money aside for their employees’ retirement, similar to Australia’s superannuation system.

“The current system is not working and we need a comprehensive approach that includes some form of mandatory savings in addition to Social Security,” Fink, chief executive officer of New York-based BlackRock, said today at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “The longer we wait to fix it, the tougher the task becomes.”

Enlarge image BlackRock Inc. Chief Executive Officer Laurence D. Fink said a mandatory retirement savings system would have to be phased in gradually and would relieve pressure on the federal budget. Photographer: Lam Yik Fei/Bloomberg

In Australia, employers must contribute at least 9 percent of part-time and full-time employees’ income into accounts that belong to workers. In the U.S., Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat and chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, plans to introduce legislation this year to require businesses that don’t offer a pension or 401(k) plan with a company match to automatically enroll workers in a so- called USA Retirement Fund.

BlackRock, which manages $3.94 trillion in assets, started a five-year branding campaign last year urging investors to buy higher-yielding assets such as stocks. Fink and other BlackRock executives have said that clients need to diversify and can be harmed by staying in cash-like products.

A mandatory retirement savings system would have to be phased in gradually and would relieve pressure on the federal budget, Fink said today.

DOL Proposal The U.S. Department of Labor said today it’s seeking comments on a proposed rule that would require 401(k) plan sponsors to include in workers’ quarterly or annual statements an estimate of what their current or projected savings looks like as a monthly stream of payments. The government is trying to keep people from outliving their savings as employers have shifted to 401(k)-type plans, where workers are responsible for investing their contributions, from traditional pension plans, which guarantee income after retirement.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alexis Leondis in New York at aleondis@bloomberg.net


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Reality Check: Obama Cuts Social Security and Medicare by Much More Than the GOP Obama plans to cut between $200 billion and $380 billion more from Social Security and Medicare than Republicans in the next ten years Derek Thompson Apr 11 2013, 12:52 PM ET More

The president's budget doesn't cut entitlements enough. That's been the unison response from Republicans since Obama released his plan yesterday. A brief sampling:

• Here's Sen. Mitch McConnell: "If the president believes these modest entitlement savings are needed to help shore up these programs, there's no reason they should be held hostage for more tax hikes."
  
• Here's Sen. Mike Johanns. "I don't believe the budget proposal went far enough."
  
• Here's Sen. Saxby Chambliss: "It is nowhere near what we need to do." 
• And here's Paul Ryan to ABC News: "I don't know if I would say that he cracked the door on entitlement reform. He has proposed to change a statistic, which saves money. That is really not entitlement reform."

From these quotes, it's easy to get the impression that the president hasn't met Republicans half-way with his cuts to Medicare and Social Security, the two biggest entitlement programs. In fact, he's exceeded them. The president's budget would spend less on both Medicare and Social Security than Ryan's GOP plan over the next ten years.


On Social Security: Ryan didn't cut Social Security by a penny. The president has proposed cutting the program's spending by $130 billion, by adopting a slower-growing measure of inflation.


On Medicare: Ryan's budget kept Obamacare's Medicare cuts and added another $127 billion. His budget projects $6.74 trillion in Medicare spending between 2014 and 2023. Obama cuts even deeper with $380 billion in cuts below his baseline, and his budget projects $6.67 trillion in Medicare spending over the same period. Upshot: Obama's ten-year Medicare budget is $70 billion below the GOP, and his announced cuts are about $250 billion deeper than the GOP. (See below for brief explainer on differences.*)


In fact, as Michael Linden at the Center for American Progress (who helped me with many of these numbers), pointed out, Obama's new proposal would mean about $1 trillion in lower Medicare spending in this decade compared to projections from before he took office. That includes the effects of slowing health-care inflation after the Great Recession. That's a 13 percent reduction!


Two questions I can anticipate.


(1) If the GOP isn't cutting Social Security and Medicare (and they're certainly not cutting defense), what are they cutting? Everything else, really. Obamacare gets demolished, and Medicaid (which, to be fair, is considered an entitlement), income-support for the poor, and non-defense discretionary all get the guillotine.

(2) Have I forgotten about Ryan's Medicare reforms after 2023? Nope. But I don't understand why, in 2013, it's considered reasonable, brave, or admirable to propose a dramatic and radical Medicare change that won't take effect for another ten years. That's seven years after Obama has left office. It's not for another two presidential election cycles plus another midterm. I'd rather talk about what these budget plans for this year, and this decade.


And here's the bottom line: Obama preserves federal Medicaid spending, he doesn't unwind Obamacare, and he spends much more on mandatory and non-defense discretionary programs than Ryan proposed. But his cuts to Social Security and Medicare combined are somewhere between $200 billion and $380 billion deeper than the GOP budget. On these programs there is no room to "compromise." The president is already to the right of the right.


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* It's hard to compare these numbers perfectly because they're operating off different baselines. The GOP budget uses the CBO baseline. The White House budget uses the OMB baseline. The baselines are close, but there are subtle differences, because not every budget analyst in Washington agrees on the exact same inflation and wage growth projection (which affects Social Security) or health-care cost growth projection, which affects Medicare.
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Danes Rethink a Welfare State Ample to a Fault

Jan Grarup for The New York Times Robert Nielsen, 45, said proudly last year that he had basically been on welfare since 2001.

By SUZANNE DALEY Published: April 20, 2013

COPENHAGEN — It began as a stunt intended to prove that hardship and poverty still existed in this small, wealthy country, but it backfired badly. Visit a single mother of two on welfare, a liberal member of Parliament goaded a skeptical political opponent, see for yourself how hard it is.


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